


Chinook Arch

by afterhours



Series: True North Strong and Femslash [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canada, Depression, Drug Use, Dubcon Kissing, F/F, F/M, Fingerfucking, Fundraising AU, Genderswap, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Pining Enjolras, Rule 63, Vaginal Fingering, if i missed anything triggering please let me know, implied disordered eating, mention of transphobia, mention of violence against women
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 19:42:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterhours/pseuds/afterhours
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you open your door to Enjolras (who rings the doorbell, and rings it again if you don't answer the first time), you're greeted by a fierce blue gaze that freezes you in your front hall as she begins to systematically challenge your life choices and explain how you can change them. She will not leave until you sign up to donate, or until you threaten to call the cops. When you open your door to Courfeyrac (who knocks out the rhythm of Top 20 hits on each door), you're greeted by a vest strategically zipped to assist her push-up bra. She makes friends with people at the door just as often as she signs them on. ...well, 'friends.'</p>
<p>Or, Enjolras and Courfeyrac are door-to-door fundraisers for NGOs, university students ahoy, genderswapping everywhere, and they're in Calgary, Canada. Because Canada's awesome. Les Mis needs more Canadian fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. She runs out of herself, out of her skin. Into freedom.

When the door opens, it’s to a familiar mass of curls, bleary, shadowed eyes, and a blast of what smells suspiciously like pot smoke. Enjolras, who had been staring intently at the door in preparation for the glare of conviction she usually unleashes on those who open it (they are supposed to smile and say hello and make small talk, but Enjolras is not a smile and small talk girl), slouches almost imperceptibly, eyes dulling, and turns to leave.

“Hey!” Grantaire follows her out onto the doorstep, heedless of her decided lack of clothing (and Enjolras does not want to know why she’s still in her underwear and a thin tank top at 4 in the afternoon, _does not_ ). “You come all the way out here and you’re not going to give me your spiel?”

Enjolras stops, though it takes her a moment to slow the momentum of how much she would like to leave this situation (there are other doors to knock on, people who might actually care), and turns to look at Grantaire. Her hair has definitely not been brushed, much of it seems to have settled into a clump on the left side of her head, and Enjolras feels strangely childish, in the vest and lanyard that declares her a representative of an organization that she does not wholeheartedly want to represent (though it’s better than an office job in Calgary, and better than nothing). “Why would I want to give you my _spiel_ when I know you won’t listen?” She takes a step closer, and then another. “Do you feel you’ve failed to show me the full depth of your apathy at the meetings?”

For a split second Grantaire looks like she’s going to flinch, but then she smiles, bright, ignoring the vaguely horrified look of a woman passing by across the street with a stroller (Grantaire has not quite realized she’s not wearing pants; she only woke up at the doorbell). “Enjolras, my darling, the day I feel I’ve given you enough realism is the day you feel you’ve given me enough pipedreams.” Enjolras can feel a headache coming on. “But you’re missing the point entirely. We both know you’re hellbent on running your ideas into the brick wall of my apathy every time you meet me, and we both know I’m too fond of your friends to stop coming to the meetings. Why miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to _get paid_ while being frustrated by me?”

Enjolras considers this for a moment. If nothing else, she knows Grantaire lives with Emile, even if she never knew _where_ they lived, until now. She doubts she could convince Grantaire to commit to monthly donations — doubts Grantaire has ever willingly committed to anything — but Emile is a possibility.

“Fine.” She studies Grantaire, shoulders squaring again, chin lifting as she begins to prepare her arguments. She has an absurd desire to brush out Grantaire’s hair. She strides back to the door, barely waiting for Grantaire to step aside before she walks in, and just for a moment, the skin of her arm brushes Grantaire’s shirt. There is a momentary delay, a stutter in Grantaire’s usually easy movements, before she follows Enjolras inside. Enjolras ignores the mess, the competing smells, and does not stop walking until she’s in the middle of the livingroom, turning to face Grantaire. “Put on some pants.” Grantaire looks down, and when she looks up, she’s grinning again. “I’m not talking to you like that.”

* * *

Enjolras wouldn’t have stayed in Calgary were it not for two factors. The first is a matter of birth: Enjolras is one of few born-and-raised Calgarians, as opposed to those who came to the city as part of the oil and gas boom. It comes with, she feels, a certain sense of responsibility for the city and its failings. Why run away to somewhere with more palatable politics, with a more vibrant activist community, when there are problems that demand solving right here?

The second factor is a matter of politics: since Harper’s rise to power, her city has become all the more synonymous with conservatism, neoliberal economics, corporate profit over social conscience and environmental sustainability. Leaving would have been running away. Leaving would have been giving them the satisfaction. Instead, Enjolras stayed, and when she’s not locked away in the library or volunteering (with Les Amis, with Amnesty at U of C, with Queers on Campus, with the Women’s Centre, with anyone who seems to need her at the time), she does door-to-door fundraising for NGOs, bringing the full brunt of her convictions to the doorsteps of Calgary’s suburban oil and gas elite.

She’s had a few talks with her boss about the importance of rapport, about making the people she speaks to feel like she is their friend, like they are the most important thing in the world to her. She had asked, as politely as she could manage, why she should give self-absorbed young professionals a stronger impression than they already had that they were the center of the universe. She had pointed out, with as much restraint as she could scrape together, that as they were attempting to fundraise for the provision of basic medical care to Syrian refugees, to those combating child trafficking across Canada, to the victims of slaughter in Colombia, that it would reflect more than poorly on the organization if she made it seem like she was more interested in whether they’d been out to enjoy the weather than in the cause she was fundraising for.

(Besides, Courfeyrac had called from the sink and microwave that is the office’s kitchen, _she_ was more than friendly enough for the both of them!)

Their boss had not been pleased, but no one can argue with Enjolras’s results. She has some of the highest funds-raised-per-hour in the country. Her coworkers write it off to terror; there is no one with the slightest sense of self-preservation who can look at Enjolras in the middle of one of her speeches and _not_ want to give her what she wants. There is something deeply unsettling in seeing a face so angelic, features so delicate, animated with a righteous fury that transcends her age and her mortal shell. It demands obedience.

It also means that Enjolras gets yelled off of people’s doorsteps more than any of her coworkers. She doesn’t yell back anymore; she is just capable enough of grasping basic social behaviour to know the organization she represents would prefer its fundraisers to refrain from verbally disemboweling the public at large, even if the public at large happens to be self-absorbed, bloated on conspicuous consumption and deliberate ignorance, gleefully apathetic.

Sometimes, fundraising can be one of the most uplifting experiences Enjolras has ever had. She’s paid to talk about the importance of fighting for global equality, for freedom from corrupt regimes and economic inequity, for the right to adequate mental health care along with its physical counterparts. She finds allies in the unlikeliest sprawling houses. Making tax-deductible charitable donations does not erase the irresponsibility and self-indulgence of multiple car garages and Louis Vuitton handbags, but it is reassuring, now and then, to find just how many Calgarians are still willing to make them. It is redemptive, being able to plumb the greed and profit of her city, to send it to those who’d look at Enjolras’s drafty downtown apartment and think _her_ rich. But sometimes, fundraising is nearly enough to make Enjolras think there are some people who don’t _deserve_ a better world.

* * *

When Grantaire returns, she is thankfully wearing jeans, though she hasn’t changed her shirt. In the moments it took her to disappear into her room, Enjolras has become acclimatized to the smell. She may have to call Courfeyrac after this and demand the use of the vanilla body spray she carries around with her; Enjolras doesn’t wear perfume, but showing up on other doorsteps reeking of drugs would not work in her favour.

“Alright,” Grantaire says, sprawling out on the couch across from where Enjolras sits stiffly in a worn plastic deck chair. Grantaire’s lips are curved in a smile that anyone else would recognize as trouble. “Spiel me.”

Enjolras barely spares Grantaire a withering look before she starts to speak, eyes fixed on the other woman’s. “You’ve dedicated the past two years to harassing me, to disparaging Les Amis, and to deliberately disrupting our attempts to better the world. You must be spending at least two or three hundred dollars a month on alcohol, and who knows what else.” Her words don’t falter in the face of Grantaire’s fading smile. “You insist that you don’t believe in our goals or our ability to achieve them, but you keep showing up, which either shows the lie in your self-proclaimed apathy, or indicates a perverse desire to _worsen_ the world through strategic harassment. We both know NGOs of this scale inevitably have sprawling bureaucracies even in the best case scenarios, and that some of its executives are almost certainly using donor money to stay in four-star hotels while visiting scenes of mass devastation and starvation. You also know, if you pay any attention to anything I say, that we’ve personally confirmed with our contacts in Pakistan that they were there after the floods. We’ve personally confirmed that the mobile vaccination clinics in Nigeria, at least, were active. We’ve personally confirmed that they were instrumental in changing child trafficking laws. It is one thing to criticize an organization for its failings; it’s another to refuse to do _anything_ because each organization _has_ its failings. If you have any respect for our friends and any empathy for worldwide suffering, you will contribute.”

By now, Grantaire is sitting up, elbows digging into her knees as she leans forward, and staring back at Enjolras just as intently. She holds up one finger, lips tight, and looks at Enjolras for the space of a few heartbeats before she replies. “First of all, do you usually make your spiel this personal?”

Enjolras does not smile. “I’m not usually in a position to do so.”

“Of course. Second of all, I don’t believe in your goals _because_ I don’t believe in your ability to achieve them. If all of them,” Grantaire gestures at Enjolras’s vest, “can’t fix the world after trying for decades, a group of university students with delusions of grandeur won’t. Trust me, other groups of university students have tried. _I’m not done_ ,” she adds to the opening of Enjolras’s mouth, which is promptly closed into pursed lips and a tight jaw. “You will not eradicate global poverty, because global poverty benefits too many people with bigger armies, armed and otherwise, than yours. Quality over quantity is one thing, but past a certain point, numbers will win. You will not eradicate discrimination, because even if we reached a Utopia where the patriarchy was dismantled and no one gave a fuck who slept with who or who had more or less education or who had a bigger nose or cellulite or open sores on their faces, we’d just find new ways to classify and exclude one another. It’s part of human psychology, and if you’re asking people to be more than human, you’re going to lose in the long run. _I’m not done._ You guys might make a few changes. You’ll raise awareness, plant the seeds for your classmates to donate 1 or 2% of their yearly income to charities when they’ve forgotten the fire that used to spread through their bellies, when they’ve lost the ability to convince themselves they can make a difference. They’ll start up child sponsorships where most of the money goes to paying CEOs and postage and taking pretty pictures. They’ll sign up for whatever charity their company has licking crumbs off its feet, and they won’t look where the money goes. They’ll pass by the homeless on Stephen Ave without a first glance, let alone a second one, and if they even notice they’re doing it around their iPhones and their Starbucks, they’ll reassure themselves that those people were only going to spend it on drugs anyway, that they’re on the streets because they’re lazy and selfish and weak-willed, and that it’s better to give to charities anyway, that the charities will take the money and give them food and shelter and help with their resumes. They won’t give to those charities, and they won’t let themselves remember that most of Calgary’s homeless are the working poor, the people who do the dirty work so they can have clean offices and freshly paved roads and soy lattes, but they’ll sleep at night easily enough. You might even change a few things here. You might go to a conference or four, talk about your ideas with other students from other cities who haven’t lost their faith yet. You’ll all leave feeling like you’re two steps away from toppling the world order, but in ten years you’ll still be slamming your head into a brick wall, over and over again, because some of those other students will have the good sense to quit but _you won’t_. Maybe you’ll become an extremist, because the longer you put up with bureaucracy and apathy and greed and hypocrisy, the more extreme solutions start to appeal to you. Maybe you’ll be in jail in ten years. But you’ll still be trying, and all the people you tried to rally beside you won’t be. They’ll be working. They’ll be vacationing at Mexican resorts. They’ll be taking Pilates-poledancing fusion classes to try and work off the pounds. They’ll be in couples therapy, or divorced and telling themselves they’re happier that way, anyway. They’ll be complaining about emergency room waiting lines and kids today. They’ll look at people like you and wonder why you never had the sense to grow up. So no, you’re not going to better the world. Not in any significant way. But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that it’s desirable that you _do_. I might not believe in your ability to win, Enjolras, but I believe in you. I’m rooting for you. Why else would I make sure you stay tethered to the ground? I want you to be the sun, not Icarus flying into it.”

Enjolras does not quite realize that Grantaire is done until she has dug a tin of cigarettes from between stained couch cushions and lit it, leaned back, and exhaled in a long plume of smoke aimed at the ceiling.

“25 dollars,” Enjolras says.

“50.”

She begins to fill out the form, the slight angling of the corners of her mouth upwards noticeable only to the most experienced observers of Enjolras’s moods, and barely registers the way Grantaire tenses or the footsteps behind her until there is a second girl on the couch, shooting Enjolras a curious look as she slides onto the couch besides Grantaire, dropping her cellphone on the table with a clank before her arm settles around Grantaire’s shoulders, fingers grazing over the bare skin beneath her tank top’s strap as she studies the scene.

Enjolras stops, just for a second, before she returns her attention to the form. “What’s the address here?” she asks, ignoring the vague sense of unease in her gut, her too-intense awareness of the movement of the stranger’s fingertips. The girl opens her mouth to answer, but Grantaire cuts her off, shrugging at the hand on her shoulder.

“Not mine.”

Enjolras looks up again, remembering the way Grantaire had opened the door, the bruises on her knees and the smell that greeted the sun with her. “Oh.”

Their conversation is restricted, from that point on, solely to form-related inquiries. If Grantaire notices that Enjolras wrote ‘60.00’ as the monthly amount, she does not notice, signs the form in silence, tosses her tax receipt on the table without looking at it. Enjolras leaves quickly enough that Grantaire barely has time to cross the livingroom before Enjolras is pulling the door shut behind her.

* * *

“Good night?” asks Combeferre, glancing up from the couch they’d salvaged from the dumpster by Feuilly’s, long since washed past all recognition, disinfected by Joly, febreezed by Courfeyrac and, inexplicably, patched up by Grantaire, a textbook and notebook splayed side by side across her lap, surrounded by handouts and study sheets.

“$200.67, 4 donors,” Enjolras says, dropping her backpack beside a couch leg and transferring a stack of paper to the table, slumping down in the vacated space and against Combeferre’s shoulder. She always smells like cinnamon, and after five years of high school and university together, the scent seems more natural to Enjolras than her own. She also has the benefit of excellent circulation where Enjolras’s is glacial, and the endless patience that allows Enjolras to slip her frozen fingers under Combeferre’s thigh without earning more than a raised eyebrow and a look of vague resignation. “One 30, two 60s, one 45.67, and one threat of a restraining order.”

“Hm,” says Combeferre, attention apparently returned to the notes in her lap, her tone neutral and lips only slightly quirked when she asks, “Do you think that one will actually come through?”

“I doubt it. Housewife. Called me a crazy dyke.” Enjolras scans Combeferre’s notes, letting herself settle the aggravations of the day with the routine study of her best friend’s neat, looping print. “I might get another talking to from Ivan, but if he doesn’t want us challenging the assertion that a woman with a two-car garage in Altadore can afford to give more than the $75 a month to charity she’s already giving, he’s in the wrong line of work.” Today was a day where Enjolras yelled back.

“That seems like a reasonable conclusion, though it’s not necessarily the only one possible.” Enjolras’s eyes follow the trail of Combeferre’s pen as it dips down to form the descender of a j, darting up to jab the tittle above it. They are silent for a few minutes, Enjolras lifting her head when Combeferre needs to turn a page, before Enjolras speaks again.

“One of the 60s was Grantaire.”

Combeferre stops in her writing, brow furrowing, and inches her head to the side to regard Enjolras, her glasses slipping just slightly down her nose. It occurs to Enjolras that Combeferre’s dark skin is very, very smooth. “Really?”

Enjolras nods, once. “It wasn’t her house. But she was there. ...she wanted to give 50, but I knew she could do 60.” A part of Enjolras has become desensitized to this, the quantification of people based on what they’re willing or able to give. She needs to remedy that. Another night.

“I see.” Combeferre leans back, still frowning slightly at Enjolras. “Whose house was it?”

It is fortunate that Enjolras is unaware that her lower lip juts out just slightly when she replies. “A drug addict who doesn’t believe in wearing pants around the house.” It is also fortunate that Enjolras misses the minute twitch of Combeferre’s lips. “She didn’t sign up.” Mind, Enjolras hadn’t stayed around long enough to ask her. She hadn’t said a word to the girl the entire time.

“Ah.” Combeferre watches Enjolras for another moment before returning her attention to her notes, her bemusement just visible in the set of her lips as she studies them. “Good for Grantaire. Did you thank her?”

Enjolras sits up fully for the first time in minutes, retracting her fingers (now bearing far less of a tactile resemblance to delicate icicles) to frown at Combeferre. “Why would I thank her?”

Again, Combeferre looks at Enjolras, face impassive. Their gazes lock for a long moment.

Enjolras looks away first.

* * *

Émile and Grantaire occupy a curious space in Les Amis. Grantaire, of course, is a student at the University of Calgary, like Enjolras and Combeferre. Unlike Enjolras and Combeferre, Grantaire is approaching her fourth year and _still_ not quite settled on her major; her year in art school only prompted more disillusion and disdain for her own pastimes, and the three years she spent finding herself involved a little bit of travel, a few revelations about the self-sabotaging workings of her own brain, and quite a lot of finding bottles of whiskey. “At present, I identify primarily as a Religious Studies and Philosophy major, with just a hint of the English minor in me,” she’d said to Combeferre, the first time they’d met. Lately, she’s been threatening to switch her major to Anthropology, leaving Enjolras in terror for her classroom environment.

Émile is not a university student, but he _is_ the reason half of Les Amis knew the organization existed to join it. Enjolras and Combeferre had started the group in their first year of university, something of a rarity, accomplished through the twin forces of Enjolras’s fierce belief that the group needed to exist, and Combeferre’s ability to calmly persuade people that they’d be beyond imbecilic _not_ to go along with whatever Enjolras is preaching about that week. Courfeyrac had joined shortly after, a hyperactive drama student from rural Alberta, and it was her gregariousness that had won over Maria and Jehan, along with several eager young gentlemen who were lured to the meetings by the promise of Courfeyrac’s cleavage, and promptly scared off by Enjolras’s speeches on the objectification of women and the responsibility of men to change one another’s thinking surrounding violence against women, slut-shaming, and patriarchal privilege.

No one knows who invited Grantaire, or if anyone did. They just know that in November, she started showing up to meetings, and that by December, everyone had grown used to her and Enjolras’s arguments disrupting meetings. Courfeyrac liked the show, and began bringing snack foods to pass around whenever the girls began to snipe at each other. Combeferre learned to bring textbooks along, to study on the occasions where the cadence of her voice and a hand on Enjolras’s shoulder could not stop them. Maria watched in mute horror while Jehan scribbled verse and other observations on her arm.

Grantaire was the one who found Joly, trapped in a kegger and staring in mute horror at the blatant disregard for personal well-being being displayed by his fellow partygoers. No one knows exactly how Grantaire convinced Joly that the best escape from the party was up onto the roof of the house, particularly considering how unsteady on her feet Grantaire had already been by that point, but ever since then they’ve been good friends, and it wasn’t long before Joly was as much a fixture of Les Amis as any of them.

Émile started coming to meetings because he’d spent too many nights listening to Grantaire bemoaning the existence of ‘an angel of vengeance, Athena reborn, a Classic messiah, _how is she real_ ’ not to be curious. Like Grantaire, Émile had begun arguing with Enjolras within five minutes of his first meeting with Les Amis. Unlike Grantaire, Émile had definitively won, tearing Enjolras apart for her privilege as a well-educated young white woman, systematically criticizing her tactics, her white saviour complex, her inability to recognize intersectional oppression. The room had been very silent when he was done.

It is a point of eternal frustration for Grantaire that her best friend gets on better with Enjolras now than she does.

Émile works at the Roasterie, a cafe in Kensington whose regulars are composed largely of self-proclaimed delinquent youth, unwashed hippies of all ages, and vegans. He is a fixture in Kensington, uncommonly broad-shouldered and well-muscled for a regular (but he’s also had much more cause to need to know how to defend himself than most of the long-limbed indie boys he serves lattes to). It is commonly suspected but never confirmed that Émile does a lot of work under the table to help make rent, some of it respectable, some of it less so. He rarely smiles, and it’s fortunate that Grantaire had worked there for a year before he started to; while he stands behind the counter, heavy brow lifting in skepticism at everyone who walks through the door with anything but the surest step, Grantaire, when there, leans over it, grinning sex and challenge at everyone who comes in. All of the regulars know Émile isn’t half as terrifying as he looks, though if you get into an argument with him, he’ll almost invariably find your weaknesses, and win. The both of them are beloved, though the people they’re beloved by is decidedly a Venn diagram; too many people find Grantaire’s self-destruction and constant jokes off-putting, and too many people are intimidated by Émile’s snark and the broad, threatening span of his shoulders.

They’d been working together for a few weeks when Coda first came in, Bossuet at his side. They were both covered in beige paint, and Bossuet promptly tripped over the first chair she encountered. Grantaire took them under her wing immediately. Bahorel was one of Grantaire’s first friends after art school, always easy to smile and easier to knock out any man who tries groping her in a crowded bar. Feuilly is the oldest of any of them except Coda, a Cree cement worker who rolls her own cigarettes and is all too eager to talk to anyone willing or too slow to get away about French Canada. Over time, all of them became Roasterie regulars, and over time, each of them became friends with Grantaire and Émile both.

So, when both the baristas began to attend meetings of Les Amis, it was only a matter of time before they did, too. By the group’s second year, it began holding its meetings at the Roasterie instead, in hopes of gathering a more diverse group of attendees.

Enjolras owes Grantaire nearly half of Les Amis, but neither of them really see it that way.

When Émile gets home from the Roasterie for the night, there is music blaring from behind the peeling paint on their apartment’s wooden door, and he opens the door to the sight of Grantaire sprawled on the floor, surrounded by magazine clippings and sketches, a joint slowly burning to nothing in between her fingers and an empty bottle of Golden Wedding beside her head. The smile she offers Émile when he comes in is too brittle to trust, and he accepts his fate within a second: tonight is a pining night.

“How were the hippies?” Grantaire asks, still smiling as Émile bends to take the joint from her and the bottle from the floor, killing the first and taking a long pull from the second as he walks to the couch, settling against the back of it as he drops the roach into an empty glass and raises an eyebrow at his roommate.

“I got a twenty dollar tip for my number tonight,” he answers, taking another swig as Grantaire starts to giggle, pushing herself up onto her elbows with some effort.

“Whose number did you actually give?”

“Bahorel’s.”

This prompts another, deeper burst of laughter, interrupted by coughing partway through. Émile moves to sit on the couch headrest as Grantaire turns away, arm covering her mouth as she waits for the fit to pass. Grantaire only coughs from pot when she’s smoked much too much, and she only smokes much too much when she’s too upset for whiskey to do the job alone.

As a general rule, that means Enjolras.

“Guess what I did today,” Grantaire says, rolling onto her back again to grin at Émile, casting a look of obvious longing to the bottle in his hand.

“Skipped work?” At this point in the night, unless Émile’s wrong, Grantaire is supposed to be serving up drinks at Kensington Pub. (Émile is not typically wrong.)

“N- yes,” Grantaire says, brow furrowing, the finger she’d raised in objection hanging crooked in the air as she leans on one arm to look at Émile properly. “But that’s not the point. The _point_.” She pushes herself to her feet, her walk the carefully perfected not-quite-coordination of a drunk who still cares enough to try to hide the damage, and moves to take the bottle from Émile, taking a swig, eyes locked on her friend’s, before she flashes him a smile. “I signed up to donate to charity.”

Émile raises an eyebrow, again. He is very good at eyebrow raising; the effect of the thick black arching up over the green of his eyes, contrasted with the coffee colour of his skin, is striking. Eyebrow-raising is one of his many strengths. “Is that code for giving a loan to Bossuet?”

Grantaire smiles, wider. It looks as though the corners of her mouth are trying to pass her dimples, trying to bisect her skull. “No. See,” she flops over the couch, almost going in a full roll down to the floor again before she steadies herself on the cushions and leans back, her head tilted up to look at Émile. “I was off fucking Allison, at her place, and the _doorbell rings_. And Allison’s locked in the shower arguing with her parents and smoking up, and I’m still half-trashed, so I think _hey, why the fuck not_ , and you know who’s there? _Enjolras._ ” She lets out another laugh, and it sounds like it rattles through her ribs on its way up. “And she... she tries to walk away, and I say hey, no, come on in, so she does, and she...” Grantaire wiggles her fingers, the neck of the bottle slipping between thumb and forefinger before Émile reaches to grab it and drink again, sitting heavily beside Grantaire, whose eyes are locked on the distance beyond their patio window. “So she does her usual bit, you know, Grantaire, why are you such a drunk, why don’t you care about anything, help me help you, and I...” She shakes her head, pulling her legs up onto the couch to cross her arms over her knees, looking down at them. “Whatever. It’s not important. But I give $60 a month to charity now. I said I’d do $50 so she wrote $60. And, see, the best part is partway through Allison comes out and starts groping me. So now, not only does Enjolras know she’s too good for me, but she’s also seen what I play with instead, which is really just fucking _peachy_ because it’s not like my dignity’s been trampled enough and—”

“Shut up,” says Émile, draining the bottle. “Get your jacket, we’re going out.” Grantaire regards him blearily, her facade of mirth thoroughly cracked. She looks like she’s forgotten how to be happy, but Émile knows she’ll be fine by tomorrow afternoon. “When does the first donation come out?”

“Next month.”

“So you have one month left to blow $60 of your paycheque as irresponsibly as possible,” Émile points out. “Do you really want to put that off?”

Grantaire thinks for a moment, then starts to smile again, more genuine as excitement starts to boil in her. She’s drunk enough that there’s a very good chance they’ll be thrown out of whatever bar they go to, but that’s not a problem. “Well,” and she stands, sways only slightly as she dips to retrieve her jacket from the floor, “when you put it _that_ way.”

Émile stands, now smiling slightly, the cast of his features conspiratorial — this, above all else, is what makes them such symbiotic friends, their ability to pull one another out of the depths and into trouble. It might be communal self-sabotage, and it might just be delaying the inevitable, but it’s better than nothing. “And since you’re feeling so charitable,” he says, already walking backwards to the door, “you can buy the first round.”

They don’t turn the music off before they leave.


	2. The calm before the so-on

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't even notice the other girl until she's progressed from studying her across the room, to striding across the floor like she’s crossing the catwalk, couples and groups parting before the certainty of her long stiletto strides, to sliding onto the cushioned bench beside Grantaire, their thighs touching, her skirt sliding up not-quite to the point of exposure, tight and high enough to draw the eye without pinching down the skin or losing dignity. She leans in, a long mane of shiny, immaculately styled dark brown hair hanging down, dark red lips and pale skin, perfectly symmetrical eyeliner, the vague scent of cinnamon. "Rough night?" she asks, breath briefly grazing Grantaire's neck, brown eyes intense and fixed on Grantaire's face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference's sake: Enjolras, Grantaire, Jehan, Feuilly, Bahorel, Bossuet, Joly, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Montparnasse all have the same names as usual. I was flipping a coin to see who ended up male or female past e/R and Joly was the only one to stay in his original gender. Sorry, Joly. No multiple orgasms for you. Éponine is now Émile. Cosette is now Cyril. Marius is now Maria. Musichetta is now Coda.

Any idiot could guess why Enjolras spends the next few days in an uncommonly foul mood. However, Enjolras has never been an idiot. Not that, as Enjolras herself would point out, anyone is an idiot, as that’s an inherently ableist term that reeks of classism, and if you think IQ tests or essay marks or vocabularies or pages-read-per-hour are at all indicative of some superior inherent worth she would be happy to cut you. 

She is, Grantaire has explained to her before, drunk on vanilla vodka and slumped against the wall, entirely too smart for her own good, which is why she is too busy planning a protest against the Alberta government's planned reduction of social services funding and intensifying her correspondence with one of the key protestors against the tar sands to reflect on why she's in such a bad mood.

Not that her mood is anyone's business but her own, unless it's affecting her efficiency.

Courfeyrac is one of Enjolras's closest friends, but there is only so much of Enjolras in this sort of bad mood that she can take. Enjolras's work ethic and focus borders on fundamentally unhealthy most of the time but she is, at least, capable of allowing her friends to relax and let loose, even if she never seems to. (Courfeyrac knows this is untrue, knows that being surrounded by her friends when they are making jokes and goofing off and laughing is one of a few things that allows Enjolras to be truly content, even if her eyes stay on her notes or a book or her laptop the entire time, but sometimes this fact is hard to remember.) When she gets like _this_ , she's impossible, and Courfeyrac leaves Combeferre to deal with her until she can be persuaded to crack a smile (or at least reduce the laser force of her glower) once again.

Door-to-door fundraising is a curious job, and the people who pursue it are equally bemusing. For Courfeyrac, it has always been the people — those she works with, and those she meets at the door — who make the job worthwhile, just as much as the causes do. There is a 48 year old woman, prone to excessive flatulence, who has a 6 month old daughter with her 18 year old ex-boyfriend. ("When you're my age and doing this job," she'd said when Courf first met her, "you know you've fucked up," and Courf had silently vowed never to let her and Grantaire meet.) There are several energetic 19-year-olds, fresh off their first year of university or halfway through their probation, who drink at least as much as Grantaire and have all been charmed into attending Amis meetings, regarding Enjolras with terror and awe in equal measure. Their boss, a man with deep smile lines in his late 30s, spent two years living in a nudist commune, where he met his husband. He is a consummate professional, his crisp suits somewhat at odds with his tattoos and the indulgent smiles he bestows on the misfits he employs. He frequently bums cigarettes off of his underlings despite the pay gap.

Once, on a Saturday, Courfeyrac and Enjolras were greeted by a man in a dress shirt collar and bowtie, cuffs, and not much else, before being enthusiastically invited inside for shots by a blonde woman with smeared eyeliner and peach-stained apple cheeks. It was a bachelorette party. Courf will never quite forgive Enjolras for dragging her away before she could accept.

Some days, though, both the job and the people in it are curious in a bad way, an Alice-in-the-worst-of-Wonderland way, a way that makes it hard for Courf to believe anything they do will _ever_ make a lasting difference, and today, with Enjolras unbearable and the May sun beating down on Courf's bare shoulders, her hair haphazardly pinned up and her enormous purse making her back ache, is one of those days.

Every fundraiser chooses what charity story to speak on, and for the last week, Courf has talked about aboriginal rights. Canada is regarded by many as a human rights haven. To be openly racist or homophobic is taboo in the metropolitan centres, even in Alberta. But for some reason, bringing up aboriginal rights seems to bring out the old school mid-twentieth century racism in even the best of Canadian suburbia. Today, it seems, Courf is meeting all of the white people Tumblr hates.

"At a guess," she says, binder in arm, sweat glistening on her brow, eyes bright and serious, fixed on the man at the door, "how much more likely would you think an aboriginal woman in Canada would be to suffer from violence than other Canadian women?"

The man at the door seems engaged, at least, but not enthused, the cant of his half-smile reminiscent of Grantaire's. "Oh, plenty more."

"But a guess?"

"Three times?"

Courf nods, solemn save the flash of teeth unconsciously bared in pleasure at the opportunity to pull back the veil and show him that, yes, it's even worse than he thought it was. "Five to seven times more likely, actually." When Enjolras is at the door, she's a barrage of facts and passion, of the sort of fierce condemnation that makes people afraid _not_ to donate; Courf prefers to engage, to get people talking, to have them talk _themselves_ into signing up. "How does that make you feel?"

"Well." The man gives a slight snort, shifting his weight to the other foot, arms crossed, leaning against the doorway. "It's not great, but if they want that to change, they should get off the reserves."

Courf stares at the man. She does her best to settle her own annoyance — at the heat of the day, being stuck with an irritable Enjolras, at this being the third time she's heard a variation on this theme in the past two hours — and reminds herself that ignorance is not irremediable. "Actually, that data isn't only for reserves. That's in major metropolitan centres. Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary."

The man shifts his weight again, looking more amused. Again, she's reminded of Grantaire, but there's something off about it — even when Grantaire is at her most incendiary, there is always a warmth behind it, and something raw, the desire to be proven wrong. This man is enjoying himself too much. "Well, who's doing it? That's mostly Native-on-Native violence, isn't it?"

Courf stares at the man, and does not let her eyelids lower the way they yearn to. "No."

"No?"

"Unfortunately, there's a disregard for aboriginal women throughout Canada and the world, particularly when it comes to white men. They're regarded as less than human. In 1971 in Manitoba, an aboriginal woman named Helen Betty Osborne was kidnapped, raped, and killed by four white men. Many of the town's white residents knew what had happened, and who had done it, but no one informed the authorities. The police didn't seriously investigate that case for almost two decades, and that's not an uncommon occurrence. A refusal to take the disappearance of and violence against aboriginal women is still prevalent. And frankly, it isn't right that our justice system works one way for some of our citizens and —"

"Can I just stop you?" The man shifts his weight again. "I get what you're saying, and it's a good thing you're doing, really, but I don't want to waste any more of your time. Throwing money at the problem isn't going to make any difference, and they have enough money as it is. Look how much good they're doing with it." Courf opens her mouth to argue, but he keeps talking. "You're very good, but I'm not signing up for anything right now. Do you guys have a website?"

"We do, but to be honest, less than 1% of our donors come from the website. What I'd like to do, sir, is make this moment count, and —"

"I'll Google you."

The door is closed, and Courfeyrac resists the urge to swear at the cream-painted wood. She does stare at it, for a moment, before turning around and going to knock on the next one. She pauses between houses to lift the map from her binder and cross out his house number, to take a deep breath and stare at a tree across the way, hoping for all their sakes Enjolras hasn't had a day like she's having.

* * *

Combeferre is used to receiving phone calls at all hours of the day, and occasionally the middle of the night. (This is less common, as the friends she has who are prone to drunk dials are much less prone to call her in times of crisis than Enjolras or Courfeyrac are, though she did once have a memorable conversation with a slurring Grantaire regarding the relevance of the Declarations of Independence and of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to modern life, a somewhat welcome diversion from a night spent alone in the library surrounded by her notes, the steady buzz of flourescent light, and the scents of caffeine and undergraduate desperation.) She has accepted this as her lot in life, and has attained an unspoken amnesty from the laws normally governing personal phone calls at work and her various volunteer obligations through sheer virtue of her immaculate schedule, her quiet efficiency, and her undeniable responsibility. Thanks to her switching her schedule to a public Google calendar, Courfeyrac no longer tries to call her regarding 'serious life crises' in the middle of lectures.

Today has been a slow day at the library, so there's nothing to worry about when her phone starts to vibrate across the counter, Courfeyrac's [self-designated contact photo](http://instagram.com/p/Qh-xN4iNB4/) popping up. (As a rule, Combeferre keeps her phone on vibrate, because Courfeyrac has an uncanny ability to unlock people's phones, and is merciless when it comes to ringtone reassignment.)

Well, she has nothing to worry about beyond the fact that Courfeyrac is calling, and that as soon as Combeferre answers the phone she starts to talk, fast and quiet. It sounds like she's hiding in the stairwell at work again.

"You need to fix Enjolras," she whispers, and Combeferre sits back in her chair, ignoring the hints of an impending headache. "For the good of humanity, you need to fix Enjolras. Combeferre, if you love me, you will fix Enjolras. I know you can. Heal her with your holy touch. I don't know what it is you do, I don't even need to know, I won't even ask — though for the record it's not nice to not share, and maybe your Enjolras-fixing can also cure herpes and cancer and the common cold, which would probably make Joly's life a lot easier but that's _fine_ — I won't even ask, but you need to fix Enjolras. Or I'm going to go insane. Combeferre, I might already be insane. It is entirely possible that heatstroke and Enjolras and the kyriarchy have already driven me insane. Tell my mother I loved her and I wish she'd fed me more brownies. Tell Jehan to write a sestina in honour of my cleavage. Tell Grantaire she can have my lingerie but only if she uses it to greet Enjolras with and save the rest of you the trouble of having to spend _yet another_ day in the presence of semi-homicidal UST. Combeferre, I leave the rest to you, to dole out to the others as you see fit. My mind is scattered. I can't think of what else to give who. To give whom? Who. I know, subject object, whatever, that's not the point. You _need to fix Enjolras_. She is prowling the office, Combeferre. _Prowling._ What she is doing is beyond the realm of pacing. It's like if in The Lion King Simba went mad with power and developed a delusion that Scar was still alive and was plotting against him. Combeferre, it's _exactly like that_ , it's —"

"Courfeyrac?" Combeferre thinks, hearing Enjolras's voice in the background, that perhaps Courfeyrac may not be exaggerating. Her voice is flat and accusatory, and yes, the headache is there now. "Who are you —"

" _Save yourself_ ," Courf hisses in her ear, and the line goes dead.

Combeferre shoots the phone a bemused look, sighing, before setting it down on the counter again and reopening her book. Courfeyrac can handle Enjolras, even at her worst, and there's nothing Combeferre can do until she's done her shift, anyway.

* * *

When Grantaire had woken up, the morning after agreeing to give more money than she had to a bullshit charity Enjolras probably doesn't even really like anyway, she was in Joly, Coda, and Bossuet's backyard. Grantaire has long been used to waking up in exciting new places with no memory of how she got there, though usually one of her friends isn't staring down at her and blocking the mid-day sun from warming her face. Thankfully, it was Coda with a cup of coffee, rather than Joly, who has officially been banned from mentioning pancreatitis, ketoacidosis, or polyneuropathy to Grantaire in daily exchanges, but could likely not restrain himself if faced with an unconscious Grantaire in his backyard. Coda understands debauchery in a way that Joly never could, though he speaks of most of his adventures in the past tense; there is only so much experimentation with psychedelics you can get away with when in a committed polyamorous relationship that involves a hypochondriac medical student prone to anxiety attacks. Coda had been exceptionally understanding about finding an alcoholic in his backyard — apparently, Emile had dropped Grantaire off there before heading to work — and had thoughtfully provided her with an obscene amount of caffeine, water, advil, and a blessed lack of questions.

Grantaire had tried vowing not to go to any social or political engagements featuring Enjolras for at least a month, or until the memory of the way Enjolras had looked at her when Allison had come out of her room had been successfully drowned. She had maintained that resolve all the way until 7:36 that night, when she'd half-snuck, half-staggered her way into an Amis meeting, trying to take joy in the way Enjolras's sentence had almost stuttered before growing more intense, more fiery. She'd spent the next twenty minutes steadily draining her flask into a hot chocolate heavily sprinkled with cinnamon, nursing the urge to poke the dragon. When she'd caved (again), and spoken up to challenge Enjolras, the other woman had barely looked at her while delivering her dismissal, flowing smoothly back into her speech as if the interruption had never been made.

It has not been a good week.

It's not even as if Grantaire doesn't _know_ how hopeless her case is. She's made a career out of falling for straight and otherwise unavailable women, has had more than her share of useless pining and one-night-stand-ins for the bodies she couldn't have. But it's never been as bad as Enjolras. It's never been as bad as slumping into a seat in a university classroom out of boredom, a vague desire to laugh at the latest student social justice warriors, and finding herself utterly blown over by a vision of blonde hair, facial symmetry, and _passion_ , the kind that hurts, the kind that you can tell burns the vessel just as much as the audience. Grantaire has been hopelessly in love for nearly two years, and she knows it's pathetic. She has accepted it.

It's not quite funny, how acceptance doesn't lessen the agony.

There are times where Grantaire is more aware than Enjolras and all her condemning speeches could ever be that the drink is dangerous, that the way her body begins to veer towards a liquor store or a bar or a hapless male face willing to buy her a drink before her mind has even processed the opportunity is a bad sign. She's older than Enjolras. She's been playing the game for _years_. She knows. But no matter how many times she tries — and she has, especially since Enjolras — she can never seem to kick it. The resolve that comes with a brutal hangover or a depleted chequing account never seems to last more than a few days.

Grantaire tells herself it's not because she _can't_ , it's just because she doesn't _want to_. She does a better job shutting out her ruthlessly realistic inner monologue at that thought than she ever does for her friends and all their dreams.

So, when she looks up from her [patio](http://brokencity.ca/patio/) table at Broken City to see Jehan, she barely has the energy to groan before letting her eyes slide back down to her pint. Jehan is a force that should not be resisted; zie doesn't have the ferocity of Enjolras, but guides zir friends just as surely with the smattering of freckles across zir nose, the quiet certainty with which zie will take anyone's limb and begin scrawling verse over skin in sharpie, zir uncanny aptitude for saying whatever you've been trying to avoid acknowledging for the past hour, or week, or decade. Jehan is not someone who can be easily sidestepped, and even if zie were, Grantaire is at the point of drunk where she knows standing will only let her know just how far gone she is. There is no point in resistance. There is only another dram to be taken from the glass, a squaring of her shoulders as she readies herself for whatever the romantic is about to say.

"Hello, Grantaire," Jehan says, the smoothness of zir voice as soothing as the slide of Baileys and coffee down a throat, as disarming as an unexpected caress at the back of the neck. Zie is drinking a Shirley Temple, and has, as always, managed to charm extra marashinos out of the bartender.

"Jehan!" Grantaire replies, aiming for cheer. "Did you know maraschino cherries used to be a delicacy worthy of royalty? Mind," she gestures with her glass at Jehan's, eyebrows disappearing into her bangs for a beat, "that was before the food colouring and simple syrup. They were only available from _Dalmatia_ which, incidentally, is where the Dalmatian received its name from. Imagine if all the poor assholes who bought their kids bad-tempered polka dot dogs after 101 Dalmatians came out had known they were buying Croatian dogs. Mind, they might have." She takes a drink. "Maybe they liked that. When was the last time you even heard about Croatia in the news? You should talk to Enjolras about that," she advises, tilting the lip of her glass pointedly at Jehan even as her good sense winces at her own drunken self-sabotage. "Fuck the tar sands. Save the Croatians. But maybe they’re doing alright, these days." She grimaces slightly, only resisting the urge to drain her pint because it would mean either getting up or waiting for the waitress to come back and fetch one. "Save the goats, instead. There's a very active factory farming culture here in our dear province. I'm sure Enjolras could find a few abused goats to crow about, if she tried."

Jehan smiles, stirring the mess of sugar and colour in zir glass idly. Grantaire resists the urge to sigh. "I heard you signed up to donate," zie says, hazel eyes steady on Grantaire, lips faintly tinged with fae green, a hue she must have made herself, or received through special order.

And really, Grantaire should have known. Enjolras does not talk about work at meetings. Courfeyrac does, to tell stories about the customers she woos and the chronic dysfunction of their coworkers and all the people who have threatened lawsuits against Enjolras, but Enjolras herself, presumably still stuck in a stilted state of shame over fundraising for charities which are never quite perfect, prefers to focus on the methods she _can_ fully agree with at meetings. Still, it should not be surprising that Jehan knows. Combeferre and Courfeyrac inevitably will, because Grantaire knows for a fact that Enjolras vents to them about her inadequacy and infuriating qualities to help defuse the urge to throttle Grantaire. And if Courfeyrac knows, Jehan will, because their mutual affection for social interference has given them a strange and terrifying affinity for one another; Courfeyrac, extreme and extroverted in her oddities, the loudest person in the bar, and Jehan, reserved, enigmatic, alternately flowery and melancholy, when combined are a force to be reckoned with only if you're feeling particularly suicidal. (Sometimes Grantaire is. Not today. Today it just seems like suicide would be another failure on her part, another mess for her friends to clean up.) Of course Jehan knows.

"Well, darling, as you well know, Alberta has a generous tax policy on charitable givings," Grantaire says lightly. "It's my fashion of a savings account. I give a bunch of deluded do-gooders and their corrupt overlords $60 every month, and at the end of the taxable year I get... $390 back." She smiles, Cheshire wide and sharp. "It's better returns than I've ever gotten trying to keep it in the bank."

"And they can mention it if you ever end up assassinated in a violent retaliation for Enjolras's political activities," Jehan chimes in, voice as calm and quiet as if zie were advising Grantaire on which courses to choose next semester. "Grantaire: local artist, valued member of the Kensington community, political activist, generous philanthropist."

"Since when am I one of you?" Grantaire asks, cocking an eyebrow, her amusement at the idea taking some of the sting out of how _unsuited_ she is to the term.

"You come to meetings multiple times a week," Jehan points out, voice still soft. "That's more than most people who consider themselves politically active do these days."

Grantaire glares at zir, but there's not much force to the thing. They don't talk about much, for the next few minutes, until Grantaire has a fresh pint before her and Jehan has deposited one of zir cherries atop the foam, to sink to the bottom of the glass a moment later. Grantaire can't quite taste that one cherry and its soft gleam of syrup, though her tongue is bothered by the task of trying to.

"You know, you make us better," Jehan says softly, after Grantaire has frowned at the cherry and its not-quite-there taste and setting the glass down again, worn out by the descending chill of evening, the absence of direct sunlight on her bare shoulders. (She hasn't spoken to Allison since the day Enjolras came. She doesn't know why she spoke to Allison in the first place.) "Enjolras was a nightmare before you started arguing with her. You know how professors always tell you to base your conclusions on your research, not warp your research to fit your conclusions? She didn't follow that until you started calling her out. Not nearly as well." Zie sees the tension threading through Grantaire's shoulders, pulling them more closely into her ribs, and sets zir hand on the table, not presuming to hold Grantaire's, but leaving the option there. "I know you don't think we can do all we want to, but I also know you're too smart not to know how much progress we've made in two years, considering our resources. And I know you want us to succeed, if only to see us happy.” Zie pauses, pursing mint lips before continuing. “You make Enjolras better. You make us happier. And gods know you've given Courfeyrac enough jokes to fill up a decade with the colours you've made Enjolras go." Zir smile is more mischievous now, zir erratic copper bob flitting slightly in the breeze. "She doesn't hate you, Grantaire. You've _seen_ how she is with people she hates."

"Yeah." Grantaire’s hand restlessly rubs the moisture off the side of her pint. "She yells at them and glares at them and tells them in excruciating detail why they're wrong. Totally unfamiliar experience. Man, I'm glad I don't have to go through that shit."

There is a twinge of sympathy in the set of Jehan's lips, but also a hint of exasperation, which is one of the reasons Grantaire loves her friend; Jehan is too familiar with melancholy to let Grantaire get away with it the way the others do. There is a startling, nauseating moment when Grantaire realizes that it's probably because Jehan believes Grantaire is better than the worst of herself, but she drowns that thought with another drink as Jehan speaks again. "And she wouldn't let you keep coming to the meetings if you were one of them. She wouldn't have meetings at your workplace. She wouldn't let her friends spend time with you, if she thought you were something to be hated. Enjolras loves her friends too much to let anyone but the best take their attention away from our missions, R." Zie stirs zir drink again, taking a sip before going on, head tilted just so, pupils wide and taking in all of Grantaire. "There is nothing Enjolras is more afraid of than being wrong, because it means she's giving her all to the wrong causes. She's a true believer, Grantaire. To find out, at the end of the day, that she was foolish in her beliefs... there would be nothing worse for her. And you're better than anyone at challenging her beliefs. And, because she's temperamental, and a perfectionist, and socially challenged, she lashes out. She yells at you because she _respects_ you. Because she’s scared you’re right. I'm not saying her actions are appropriate, or forgivable. I'm just saying she doesn't hate you."

"Well," Grantaire says, words sluggish to come out of the mess of hops-soaked grey matter in her skull, "I'm not in the habit of caring what overexcited blondes struggle with, socially, but if I might ask, what brought this talk on?"

"I thought you might have been forgetting that she doesn't hate you," Jehan says, calm again, sipping. "You needed a reminder. Also, it's time for a group night."

Oh no. No, no. Group nights were the brainchild of (of course) Jehan and Courfeyrac. It doesn't matter that Les Amis already meet officially once a week and unofficially at least once more. It doesn't matter that the group is already incestuous and codependent to the point of Lannister comparisons. Group nights are called whenever one of their local meddlers decides that the group dynamic has fallen out of sync, that they all need a night together outside the framework of social justice. The first group night involved Combeferre and Enjolras's apartment, Courfeyrac's laptop, a projector and screen Bossuet and Joly had liberated from the university with Emile's help, and a marathon of the worst B movies Courfeyrac could find. Enjolras had been under strict orders not to launch into any angry speeches about objectification, homophobia, sexism, racism, or any other social issue brutally butchered in the evening's line-up (a rule she had tried breaking, thrice); instead, it was declared that social commentary could only be offered through sarcasm and dry wit. Seeing that Enjolras couldn't even refrain from a tirade for the duration of Shark Attack 3: Megalodon hadn't been the nail in the coffin; seeing Enjolras finally settle down and join the others in brutally incisive, irreverent digs at the movies had been. That had been the night Grantaire had realized she could spend the next twenty years taking abuse from the younger woman and still be helplessly, hopelessly in love with her. She'd spent a week after that going through at least a 26 of whiskey a day.

Group nights are trouble. Group nights break up the rhythm. Group nights come with too many _promises_ that are never kept.

Grantaire assumes the stare she's giving Jehan — equal parts deadened, derisive, and horrified — is answer enough for her feelings on the subject, but Jehan continues. "We're going to Commonwealth. One of Courfeyrac's friends is DJing tonight, and we're going to go support her. We are going to dance. We are going to make Enjolras take at least two shots. And you are going to spend time with your friends and stop moping."

Jehan is truly terrifying when zie smiles like that, unruffled and sugary sweet. You just keep waiting for the fangs to peek out.

"Well, who am I to say no to a night of dance and drink?" Grantaire says finally, voice only a little tight in the middle of her throat. She lifts her glass. "You know I can't resist watching you idiots trying to convince Enjolras to have fun. As Sir Ken said, nothing like watching someone dance when they think their body's just a transportation device for their brain." She takes a long drink, only a few inches of beer guarding the cherry at the bottom of the glass when she sets it down again.

Jehan smiles again, a little wider. Zie looks pleased, popping a cherry into zir mouth and draining zir Shirley Temple before handing Grantaire the last two cherries, which she takes in mercifully numb fingers, staring at them before returning her gaze to Jehan. "Good. I'll see you then."

"What?" Grantaire leans back, the smile sliding more naturally over her face again. "You'd leave me like this, full of nerves, cherries in hand, abandoned and shivering in the moonlit night?"

"Grantaire, it's 7. It's not going to be moonlit for a while yet," Jehan points out, not unkindly, shrugging off zir jacket and draping it around Grantaire's shoulders. "I'll see you in a couple hours. Text me if you need me."

"Right," Grantaire says, the momentary flare of joviality leaving her with the growing distance between her and Jehan. The downside of having the best brought out of you by your friends, she thinks, is that when they go away, you have nothing left to yourself worth keeping.

* * *

Enjolras does not like going out. She is hardly a recluse (though there are days when she would like nothing better than to orchestrate the revolution from afar, when the idea of dealing with people — again — and seeing them ignore her arguments — again — and have to come face to face with bigotry and resist the urge to punch it in the face — again — is simply too exhausting), but Enjolras's ideas of worthy reasons to leave her apartment include a) classes, b) meetings, c) rallies, d) public forums, e) work, f) coffee. They do not include a) drinking, b) dancing, c) fumbling hookups, d) music so loud it loses all melody and becomes a wall of sound. This means that, typically, when Enjolras's friends go out to clubs, she does not join them.

Enjolras has no problem with this state of affairs. Enjolras may be exasperated by how enthusiastic some of her friends are about the above pursuits, but so long as they aren't getting themselves hurt, hurting others, or failing to fulfill their commitments as Amis, it is none of her business how they spend their free time. She wants her friends to be happy. She will even tolerate movie nights, because she knows they make her friends happy, and sometimes she is allowed to choose a documentary for movie night. She does not, however, have any interest in spending her money on cover charge to go into a club full of people saturated with alcohol or worse, desperately pawing at each other, courting deafness. She will not enjoy it. They will not enjoy watching her not enjoy it. The effort exerted is pointless.

And yet, in the last ten minutes of talking, Jehan has managed to plant a seed of doubt in Enjolras's chest that is slowly taking root, making her feel like she's being _rude_ for not agreeing from the start. They are, Jehan reminds her, going to support Courfeyrac's friend. (Which is fine, but Courfeyrac's friend is not, in this case, her friend, and she does not see how her being there or not will help Courfeyrac's friend, especially when she knows she will inevitably not enjoy it, and it will show.) It is, Jehan insists, a group bonding night. (And Enjolras has never understood how they fail to bond at meetings. Really, none of the reasons Jehan are giving are particularly compelling, but somehow Enjolras is slowly being gripped by the urge to comply.)

Most of the time, Jehan is a pleasure to know, articulate and dedicated and nurturing. Sometimes, Enjolras is forcefully reminded that all of Jehan's help and brilliance comes with a price, just like anyone else's.

"So you'll come?" Jehan prompts, smiling widely, all tooth and freckle.

Enjolras shifts under the enthusiasm of zir gaze, brow still furrowed. "I really wasn't hoping to spend my evening being accosted by drunk men," she says. It is a fact that if Enjolras goes to a club, drunk men will approach her. She's too lovely not to eye, and as the music is always too loud for anyone outside a one foot perimeter to hear what she's saying, men in clubs do not hear the warnings men in pubs do to stay the fuck away.

"And you can eviscerate them appropriately if they try," Jehan says smoothly. "If you get bored of that, Bahorel can be your personal bodyguard. I think she's been spoiling for a fight this week."

The idea of getting Bahorel kicked out of a club and possibly arrested is not especially appealing, though the idea of getting to see Bahorel punch some overgrown fratboy in the face again is not without its allure. Enjolras does not advocate violence, generally, but there is no official Amis ban on physical retaliation.

"I don't like club music," Enjolras says finally, feebly. Jehan's smile spreads, zir cheeks rounding out in victory.

"I know you don't," zie says neatly. "And not everyone likes having to memorize statistics, but we do it before every rally, because you want us to have facts to back up our rage if anyone gets in our face. Friendship means the occasional compromise, Enjolras. Come tonight. It would mean a lot, and it's not like you have to get shitfaced or talk to anyone you don't want to. Just come and show your support."

Behind Jehan, doing the dishes, Combeferre is pointedly not looking at either of them, her eyebrows slightly raised. She is doing the thing where she waits for Enjolras to realize what the right decision is. She has already agreed to go and she, as a full-figured black girl prone to bad headaches, has just as many reasons to bow out as Enjolras. Enjolras sighs.

She hates it when Combeferre does _the thing_.

"Fine," she says. "I'll come. For as long as Combeferre does," she adds quickly, before Jehan gets any ideas about letting Courfeyrac try to convince Enjolras to do shots again.

Still, Jehan keeps smiling, looking serene. "That's fine." Zie leans forward, kissing Enjolras on either cheek as zie stands up, zir lipstain meadow green, zir leggings neon orange cartoon bats on a black background, badly torn. "I'll see you two then."

* * *

Though Bahorel and Feuilly have known each other for less than two years, the two are like siblings: irrevocably close, sometimes bordering on psychic, and often mutually antagonistic. Bahorel, who met Grantaire while getting her BDes in Photography — a follow-up to her BSc in Journalism, her TEFL certification, and her diploma in Recreation Therapy — registered at the U of C for a BA in History the September after her first Amis meeting. She has masses of student loans and a vast collection of brightly coloured steel-toed boots, and no one is quite sure how she's managed to avoid bankruptcy or a long-term jail sentence thus far. Feuilly, not quite half a foot taller than Bahorel's 5'6", Métis, with bluntly cut shoulder-length henna red hair, has long, strong limbs and calluses, and a collection of Value Village dresses to counteract her work clothes, on the rare occasions she has time to change out of her work clothes. What spare time Feuilly has between cement work, tutoring in French, and meetings with Les Amis, is typically spent with Bahorel. Feuilly is one of the only people who can convince Bahorel to shut up when she loses track of what she's saying and falls into incoherent antagonism. Bahorel is one of the only people who can convince Feuilly to let loose.

All in all, it works.

Commonwealth isn't really the sort of club you'd expect to see Les Amis at. Typically full of girls in stilettos who spend long periods of the night either gossiping or puking in the restrooms, populated by hapless boys who would just as soon cop a feel as ask a girl her name, it is typical of many clubs in Calgary, though not so rampantly debauched as Cowboys or The Roadhouse. Still, the music is loud, the drink prices could be worse, and Courfeyrac's friend is DJing, so there they are. They both earn stares when they enter, Bahorel's boots bubblegum pink, wearing torn jeans and a white wifebeater that was once graffiti’d by a drunk Grantaire, Feuilly taller than nearly any other girl in the place and wearing a long white lace dress. They look equally disinterested in everyone who is staring at them, though Bahorel smirks while she disregards.

"Hey _asshole_!" Bahorel shouts at Courfeyrac's back, loud enough to make everyone around the pair jolt but not quite loud enough to reach Courf over the music as she chats with two brunets, one tall and one slight, her hair hanging down loose over a glittery blue haltertop. She presses a thorough and wet kiss to Courf’s cheek when she reaches her, prompting raised eyebrows and flickers of amusement from both boys. Feuilly stands off by a few inches, already itching for a cigarette in the heat and noise of the club.

"Bahorel! Feuilly!" Courfeyrac's smile is wide and circled with dark red lipstick, an arm sliding around Bahorel's waist even as she turns to flash her friend a smile of greeting. "This is Paul, my DJ friend. DJ Polyester, which as I've been telling him is a far inferior name to DJ Spandex Banana Hammock. We're all _very sad_ about his horrible taste," Courfeyrac shouts a little so the words reach Feuilly, before turning back to smile at the boys. "And this is Cyril, Paul's poor, abandoned friend. Cyril doesn't have anyone but Paul here with him for the night, so we're going to adopt him while Paul plays. Cyril, the short one's Bahorel, and the soulless ginger is Feuilly. They're trouble, so whatever they try to talk you into doing, do it."

Cyril — who barely looks old enough to be in here, with bright blue eyes and a boyish face — smiles slightly. For all his apparent youth, there is something keen in his gaze as he takes the pair in. "Nice to meet you," he shouts over the music. Bahorel looks him over, then nods, once, still faintly smirking. "How do you two know Courfeyrac?"

"We're delinquent activist fucks together!" Bahorel shouts. "And we're here to get drunk. Want to come get a shot?"

There's a flicker of discomfort in Cyril's face, though it's barely visible. "No thanks," he says. "I don't really drink that much." Bahorel's smirk grows, and she cocks an eyebrow at Courfeyrac before nodding. "Alright, Cee. We'll be back, then. My friend here works too hard and we have to make her forget the tragic monotony of her life." Giving Courfeyrac a firm clap on the shoulder, she heads for the bar, Feuilly following.

With the pair gone, the boys' attention is returned to Courfeyrac, and Paul leans forward close enough for his breath to be hot on Courfeyrac's ear. "Why do you all go by your surnames?" he asks.

Courfeyrac smiles again, leaning back. "We're pretentious."

* * *

Grantaire hadn't meant to get this drunk this early.

That she'd get this drunk was a given — her face had already been going numb when she'd spoken to Jehan, and even after she’d bummed a free meal off her coworkers at Kensington Pub, the heaviness in her stomach had simply been delaying the inevitable, reversing some of the damage so she could approach her breaking point from an hour or two back. She was going to Commonwealth, and if Jehan's threats came through, Enjolras would be there, too. Enjolras would be there, trying to look as though she weren't miserable, drinking glass after glass of water and glaring daggers at anyone who tried coming on to her, and thus it was a given that Grantaire would have been this drunk sooner or later. Ideally, it wouldn't have been until she'd said her hellos, smirked at Enjolras, possibly needled her a little at the outer edges of the club, danced with a few people, paid her dues to Jehan's incessant concern. Ideally, it wouldn't have been until Enjolras had given up and left earlier than anyone else. Ideally, it wouldn't have been until she was safely at home, with her own bottles, which were much cheaper than the drinks at the club. Ideally, it wouldn't have been this early.

And yet, she'd said her hellos to Courf and Jehan, then disappeared into the lower level of Commonwealth, and now here she is, definitely this drunk, definitely this early. The basement of Commonwealth is a blur of darkness and noise and people all around her, their speech buried beneath beats, their gestures fuzzy in lighting made to not quite make out the features of who you're chatting up until the next morning. Her brain is soaked with vodka and rum and whiskey and beer, beer ages ago, liquor before beer, you're in the clear, beer before liquor and you're living Grantaire's whole fucking _life_.

She doesn't even notice the other girl until she's progressed from studying her across the room, to striding across the floor like she’s crossing the catwalk, couples and groups parting before the certainty of her long stiletto strides, to sliding onto the cushioned bench beside Grantaire, their thighs touching, her skirt sliding up not-quite to the point of exposure, tight and high enough to draw the eye without pinching down the skin or losing dignity. She leans in, a long mane of shiny, immaculately styled dark brown hair hanging down, dark red lips and pale skin, perfectly symmetrical eyeliner, the vague scent of cinnamon. "Rough night?" she asks, breath briefly grazing Grantaire's neck, brown eyes intense and fixed on Grantaire's face.

Grantaire struggles to focus on her face and can only really register 'hot.' She thinks if she were more sober she'd want to draw the girl. There's something in her posture, the slim lines of her body and the intesity of her gaze, that reminds Grantaire of Enjolras. But the girl is more sensual, not so maddeningly beyond the reach of mortal filth. It takes her a moment to realize she is supposed to be answering a question, and when she does, she is not quite aware of how needlessly loud she is in doing so. "It's always a rough night. Except when it's not night. Always _rough_." A pause and then, "Sorry, am I supposed to know you?" This happens to Grantaire sometimes. She meets people shitfaced and neglects to remember them later. She has been yelled at for this. Once, memorably, she was punched.

The girl smiles, slowly, like it's only meant to be seen by Grantaire, which is a little funny since she's having trouble focusing her pupils, though maybe not as funny as it could be, since _she's having trouble focusing her pupils_. "Not yet. But soon." She reaches for Grantaire's hand — and that's okay, she guesses, she wasn't really doing anything with that hand anyway, or the other one — and kisses it, lips remarkably dry considering the depth of their colour. The bow of her mouth curves around Grantaire’s knuckles as she lifts her face again. "I'm Parnasse."

"Parnass?" Grantaire repeats, brow furrowing slightly, not quite catching the flash of irritation that crosses the other woman's face.

"Montparnasse," she corrects, leaning in to make sure Grantaire catches it, inasmuch as Grantaire's capable of catching anything right now.

The name sounds vaguely familiar in a way Grantaire doesn't have the energy to place but she pushes it away, focusing instead on the bridge of Parnasse's nose, which is long, narrow, and very straight. She has a mole beneath her left eye, darkened with brown liner, and no other distinguishing marks on her face. No wrinkles. No zits. No scars. There is something unsettling about how smooth her skin is; it looks like Photoshop, like perfectly applied makeup. Where are the pores? Grantaire blames the mood lighting.

"Hello, Montparnasse," Grantaire says, her syllables starting to straighten out now that there's someone here to act slightly more sober for. "Your skin is very smooth. Have you considered the possibility that you're an animate mannequin? Because if you are, I've been waiting for this for some time. I knew as soon as they aired that Doctor Who episode that we were all doomed; the CG was too deliberately bad, you know? Like they were trying to get us to let our guards down to clear the way for the mannepocalypse. But I'm onto them. So if you're living plastic, you should know: I'm onto you, and I know krav maga."

Montparnasse's features barely flicker as Grantaire rambles on, save the briefest hint of confusion at the Doctor Who reference, her smile spreading slow again as she toys with Grantaire's fingers, drawing finely manicured nails up between bony knuckles. "Let's get you some air," she says.

* * *

If questioned, Maria would not have been able to explain why she approached Enjolras, upon spotting the angel with the blue eyes. Approaching Enjolras with your personal problems is only advisable if your personal problems involve having to deal with some sort of structural inequality, and even then only if you are willing to put up with Enjolras organizing a rally for you or able to talk her down out of doing so. Interpersonal skills are not Enjolras's strength; she has many friends, and loyal ones, because she is passionate and brilliant and willing to do a great deal for the people she loves, but she is also about as emotionally intelligent as a fifth-grader, and easily irritated by social drama.

Still, as Maria has just seen an angel, it is only fair that her judgment is off-balance.

"Do you know who that is?" she asks Enjolras, urgently, her tightly curled hair bouncing with the nervous energy a brush with divinity has brought on, her pulse racing. Enjolras gives Maria a strange look, as Maria is not pointing at anyone, and the club is full of quite a lot of people, most of whom she does not, in fact, know. For social inquiries in a crowded club, it is best to seek Courfeyrac and Grantaire, both accomplished socializers and general women-about-town.

"Who?" she asks, when it becomes clear Maria will not be looking at Enjolras to see her look of consternation, as the shorter girl's eyes are busy scanning the crowd.

"I've just seen the most wonderful boy," Maria says, eyes still flitting from head to close-cropped head, not seeing the way Enjolras's shoulders slump slightly, the dulling in her eyes. "He was _beautiful_. We met each other's eyes and I just —" finally, she seems to remember who she's speaking to and, shooting Enjolras a look full of trepidation and preemptive humiliation, seems to shrink. "I'll go find Courf," she says, and disappears before Enjolras can reply.

It isn't that Enjolras _dislikes_ Maria — though she's found it difficult to take the girl seriously or calmly since she tried defending the Conservatives' economic policy — and she has been trying her best to be civil, even friendly, when she remembers to. She knows Maria is one of Courfeyrac's best friends, that much of the group likes her, and she has been told in no uncertain terms by Combeferre that Maria's hardly going to see Enjolras's side of things if she glares at or dismisses Maria all the time. She does her best to be nice, but honestly, a _boy_? Enjolras has about as much interest in taking stock of the men in this club as she does in writing out a list of reasons why Tom Flanagan has value to the academic world. _Boys_ are not her area of expertise.

A moment later, one such creature, in a long-sleeved shirt, with artfully gelled hair, leans down to say something in her ear, and the glare Enjolras shoots him is enough to send him to the opposite side of the bar in under ten seconds.

Making friends has never been easy for Maria. Her grandfather, a Mennonite who left the faith in favour of more lucrative life philosophies, had had her homeschooled, not eager to have his only granddaughter socialized with the children of immigrants chasing the oil boom. It wasn't until Maria got her high school diploma and, shortly after admission to the University of Alberta and the discovery that her grandfather had kept her from knowing her father (too little too late, as the revelation came with the obituary), that she realized just how fully she had been sheltered. The resulting argument had been bad, Maria had been cut off without a penny, taking what money she had left to catch a Greyhound bus to Calgary — just to _get away_ — and left to fend for herself. She had never had a job before. She had never really had friends her own age. And she had no idea how much catching up she had to do until, suddenly, she was swimming without a lifejacket.

Courfeyrac had found her wandering downtown Calgary, a dollar piece of pizza in hand and her suitcase in tow. It had been terrifying at first, a tall, curvy brunette coming up in a ridiculous pair of red heels and a tight dress, smiling brightly. Maria had been unable to quite keep track of the conversation. One minute, the girl had been asking her name, and the next, she'd been unpacking her suitcase in Courfeyrac's spare bedroom. Truth be told, friendship with Courfeyrac has never stopped being terrifying, but she'd helped Maria find a job at a diner downtown, shown her around the city, and helped her get her student loan application through so she could study at the U of C instead, and Maria knows if it hadn't been for Courfeyrac, she probably would have crawled back to her grandfather a long time ago, or worse.

Courfeyrac's friends — who are many, and frequently just as terrifying as Courf herself — have mostly been friendly with Maria, but Maria knows she's still an outsider, just Courf's plus one. She knows she's not radical enough or liberated enough for them, even if she's tried her best to wrap her head around their opinions, to offer her own as politely as she can (certainly more politely than Enjolras counteracts them). The only one of Courf's friends who really seems to pay attention to her is Emile, who is nice, but intimidating.

Social situations aren't easy for Maria. She doesn't like getting drunk, discovered that the first time Courfeyrac took her to karaoke night and she ended up throwing up in the middle of “Don't Stop Believin'” on stage, and most men are unnerving. Most of them are much too clear about what they're interested in, and the ones who aren't upfront about it are even worse to deal with. Maria doesn't think it's too much to ask for, the romance and the courtship and the fairytale ending. If nothing else, her grandfather's betrayal taught her how important it is to have a relationship built on mutual trust and loyalty rather than self-interest.

It's unusual for Maria to get excited about boys, in the long term. Most of them don't interest her, and the ones who do show their true colours soon enough. But _this boy_.

Maria doesn't know exactly what it was about him that spoke to her. He was smaller than most of the boys in there — which is fine by Maria, who only barely clears 5'2" — hanging out of the fray, eyes intent on the crowd. He just looked _thoughtful_. His face was kind. And when they met eyes...

It's a bad habit, averting eye contact. Maria knows it makes her look weak, but she can't fight the impulse, most of the time. But when the angel had met her eyes, she'd just... She hadn't known what to do. She didn't know how to talk to boys. She barely knew how to talk to _girls_. She'd looked away, busied herself with her purse, and a moment later the boy had been gone.

Courfeyrac will know who he is, surely. If not, she'll find out who he is. Courf has never been shy, not like Maria. And never before has Maria wanted to take advantage of that fact the way she does now. To have looked upon a boy like that and then never see him again...

Maria doesn't think she could handle it. It's unthinkable. She finds Courf, finally, in the middle of the dancing crowd — the music guttural, resonating in her bones, Courfeyrac's hair everywhere, her arms in the air, armpits unshaven, Jehan and a man Maria doesn't know dancing up against her — and grabs her arm, urgently. Courf greets her with a smile, until she sees the look on Maria's face, her own expression sobering despite the several brightly coloured shots she's already had, leaning down to yell in Maria's ear. "What's up?"

"I need you to help," Maria replies, aiming the words for Courfeyrac's ear, shooting an apologetic look over her shoulder at Jehan. Courf, however, doesn't seem upset about the interruption (she never is), and she shoots a smile over her shoulder at her dance partners and sets a gentle hand on Maria's elbow to steer her out of the worst of the crowd, towards the smokers' area out back. Neither of them smoke, but it's closer than the bathroom, the only other part of the club that's quiet enough to speak in. Maria glances around as they descend the steps into the relative chill of the night, but she can't see her angel anywhere around — there are people smoking everywhere, varying levels of stability to their stance, and one pair of girls kissing deeply against the chain fence, two feet of distance between them and anyone else, but not _him_.

"What's up?" Courf asks, voice low and firm, brows lowered slightly as she surveys Maria.

"I just... I saw a boy," Maria starts to explain, feeling suddenly stupid surrounded by all of these people, sobered by the cold and the absence of a beat in her gut. Courf, however, smiles, eyebrows shooting up again. Maria feels a twinge of trepidation at that smile; she has seen it precede several inappropriate jokes, almost the same every time, right down to the exaggerated arch of her right brow.

" _Did_ you!" Courf looks around, as if expecting to see this magical creature right behind her. (Maria can't blame her; she keeps glancing out of the corner of her eyes, as if _wanting_ to see him again will make it happen.) " _Well_ then..." suddenly, Courf tenses, frowning at something on the other side of the small, fenced section of the back alley Commonwealth designates for smokers. Maria turns to follow her gaze, frowning, and it's only as Courf starts towards the pair, saying "Hey!" that Maria finally recognizes Grantaire, pushed up against the fence, arms around the other girl's neck, legs straddling the long slim curve of the other girl's thigh. Whoever has Grantaire pinned up against the fence does not seem interested in the sudden protest behind her, nor does Grantaire, who has already left scratchmarks down the other girl's back. Maria can't tell whether she's supposed to look away or keep an eye on the situation, already embarrassed for Grantaire, but well aware that, as this is _Grantaire_ , it's entirely possible she's being taken advantage of. (But do girls really do that?)

"Hey," Courf says again, placing a hand on the strange girl's shoulder, frowning deeply as she turns around. The stranger does not seem concerned at the interruption, though there's a heat barely hidden in her eyes as she leans back just far enough to take Courf in, lips a firm line, painted red. Grantaire slumps slightly in the absence of the other girl's body pinning her to the fence, eyes half-lidded, only now beginning to recognize Courf, the flicker of a greeting smile followed by a distant look of displeasure at the look on her friend's face. Courf offers the strange girl a tight smile and her hand, spine rigid. Both of them are tall, though Courf has the advantage of weight on the other girl. "We haven't met. I'm R's friend, Courfeyrac. We've been wondering where she was."

The other girl offers Courfeyrac a smile similarly devoid of warmth, but smoother, more at ease. "As you can see," the girl says smoothly, her voice just barely audible from where Maria is, adjusting her grip on Grantaire to take Courfeyrac's hand and shake it, once, "she's in excellent hands. It's good to know some of Grantaire's friends give a damn, though."

"We all do," Courf says, brow lowering more. "Sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"Montparnasse." For a moment, Maria almost thinks she recognizes the girl and she frowns, trying to place her face, but between the rigours of the night and worry for Courfeyrac and Grantaire, she can't focus on the task.

"Interesting meeting you, Montparnasse." Courf moves her attention from the girl to Grantaire. "R, are you okay?"

"M' _fine_ , Courfy," Grantaire drawls, smiling wide and lazy up at Courfeyrac, not quite steady on her feet. "I'm great. Have you met Parnasse? She's very nice. She has nice teeth."

Courfeyrac frowns at Grantaire for a moment, eyes barely flicking to Parnasse's mouth — which is, indeed, bared in a small, sharp smile, showing very white teeth — before she focuses on her friend again. "Hey Grantaire, do you want to get Parnasse's number and come back with us? Maria and I were going to go grab some food, and Jehan's proposed a slumber party."

Grantaire bursts out in high, hurried giggles, the somewhat somber face she'd worn to listen to the first part of Courfeyrac's proposition lost in the last of it. "I'm already going to a slumber party," she says through the giggling, arms tightening around Montparnasse's neck. "But you kids have fun. Don't stay up too late. Try not to save the world without me. Shan't believe it happened ‘less I see it with my own eyes."

Montparnasse is smiling fully again, but the smile disappears when Courfeyrac places a hand on Grantaire's arm, pulling her closer. "Why don't you get Parnasse's number and have a slumber party with her another night? I think Jehan would like to see you."

"She said she's fine, _Courfy_." Montparnasse's voice is much colder than the night May air, and that barely restrained heat in her eyes is closer to the surface now as she glares at Courfeyrac. There was a moment, when Courf first reached for Grantaire's arm, that Montparnasse tensed, looking like she was about to strike out, and Maria's phone is out. She can't tell whether or not she should call the cops. Shouldn't there be security out here?

"Look," and it's unusual to see Courfeyrac get genuinely angry — riled up by Enjolras's speeches, sure, but she's always optimistic in her desire to change the world, never _scary_ the way Enjolras gets — but there it is, her fingers are tighter on Grantaire's arm, prompting a frown from the artist, and the look she is giving Montparnasse makes it clear she would have no problem smashing the other girl into the fence if provoked. Maria's thumb hovers over her phone’s screen. " _You_ might be content for my friend to say she wants to fuck you when she's too drunk to stand up straight, but _I'm_ not. If you like her that much, you can let her have your fucking number and see her again later, when she's not _half-asleep_. Now _let go of my friend_ and we can all go back to having a nice night, ‘kay?" The looks Montparnasse and Courfeyrac are giving each other would make lesser women shrink back into the nearest available hiding spot, and Maria just hopes Courfeyrac doesn't decide to _start_ any violence, because if she does calling the police is going to get much more complicated.

Still, however angry Courfeyrac and Montparnasse look, it has nothing on the darkening of Grantaire's expression as she processes Courfeyrac's words, the lazy slump of her shoulders melting away as she stands straighter, looking at Courfeyrac with the kind of indignant rage she usually only spares for Enjolras.

* * *

Combeferre, at least, seems to be having no trouble blending in. Every now and then, despite how well they know each other, Enjolras is surprised by Combeferre. She knows so much about her friend — her bashful affection for expensive teas, how she takes different kinds; her soup preferences when sick; her thoughts on the role of postsecondary education in the 21st century; how she'd struggled to come to terms with intersectionality as a black teen in Calgary, where being Asian or Arab no longer raises eyebrows but being black is still sufficiently rare to comment on; her first kiss (a boy named Michael, at 12, who had been altogether too enthusiastic with his tongue); that she was born at 6:38 AM on September 26, and doesn't mind if Enjolras brings her breakfast at the exact time she reaches another year; the names of her family members and every fish she had as a child — but she's occasionally reminded of just how much about Combeferre she _doesn't_ understand.

For example, when Combeferre is invited to dance by a tall, grinning boy who Enjolras immediately sorts and dismisses in her brain as wannabe frat and almost certainly sexist, and Combeferre accepts, calmly asking if Enjolras could hold her drink, Enjolras is surprised. It isn't, she thinks, the first time she's seen Combeferre participate in flirting — she usually avoids outings at venues like this, but she's been coerced into them before, and Combeferre has always been strangely content to humour people who approach her, provided they do so politely — but she never quite understands _why_ Combeferre does it. Her friend has never dated anyone in all the time Enjolras has known her, any more than Enjolras herself has. But somehow, she's so much better at participating in the rituals associated with the mind-numbingly dull and oppressive heteronormative dating life than Enjolras is, not normally a skill Enjolras values, though when _Combeferre_ is happy to do it, Enjolras can't help but suspect she's missing something important.

She doesn't notice Joly approaching her until he's there, Bossuet and Coda just visible, disappearing into the dancing throng. Joly's shoulders are tense, but he's smiling as he comes, not leaning against the table like Enjolras is, but standing straight beside her, a brief flicker of unease crossing his face as he turns to look at everyone grinding together, though it melts away as he turns his attention back to his friend. "You came," he says, leaning down slightly so the words can reach her ears through the din. He looks happy to see her, and Enjolras can't help but relax a little. This might be an imbecilic waste of time, and her friends might all be destined to regret their choices for the first several hours of consciousness tomorrow, but it's nice, she'll admit, to watch them having fun, even if she has to stand in a crowded club full of bigots and too loud music to do so. She notices he's wearing bright orange earplugs as she leans in to reply, and knows Bossuet and Coda will be wearing them, too.

"Yes," Enjolras nods, resisting the urge to be honest and say, 'Jehan made me.' She suspects it's the right choice, since Joly smiles wider, the smile only barely flickering as he glances at the crowd again. (Grantaire has accused Enjolras, in the past, of not paying attention to any of them unless they're serving some use for her, but that isn't true; Enjolras remembers, as Joly looks around, the time he'd told them about how bad his anxiety had been when he was younger, how just going into the grocery store could leave him breathless with fear, and she's in equal measure proud of how far he's come and guilty that she has no idea how to put him at ease now, surrounded by people and health hazards. Putting people at ease has never been Enjolras's strong suit.) She leans towards him, her and Combeferre's drinks still in hand, nodding slightly to where she'd seen Marius and Courfeyrac disappear some minutes before. "Do you want to get some air? It's not easy talking in here."

Joly smiles wide again, and nods, eyes flicking uncertainly to Enjolras's drinks. "I don't think talking was the idea," he remarks as they head for the hallway to the back, Enjolras leaving her and Combeferre's water on the table in the corner. The bright side of not drinking, aside from not poisoning yourself, not making irrational and impulsive decisions, maintaining your equilibrium, and not nursing a hangover the next day, is that it never hurts your wallet if you have to pick up a new drink. The door is cracked open, but it's not til Enjolras is pushing it to go through that she realizes she recognizes the voice she could hear from the tail end of the hallway.

It's Grantaire, obviously drunk (that's another thing Enjolras has learned about her friends; she's catalogued Grantaire's various states of intoxication, their more obvious cues, and exactly how unbearable Grantaire gets in each), and looking fairly murderous at Courfeyrac, of all people. Enjolras tenses, stepping forward, brow furrowed, and it's this sudden movement that seems to draw Grantaire's attention to her, prompting a single, bitter bark of laughter as she takes Enjolras in.

* * *

It isn't as if Grantaire needs help remembering she's a total fuckup. She's excellent at remembering that on her own, knows better than anyone her failings and bad habits. She also, incidentally, does not need a babysitter, and the fact that it's _this_ hookup that Courfeyrac was around to try and interrupt is bleakly hilarious. As far as her drunk decisions go, Montparnasse isn't half-bad. She's a great kisser, seems inexplicably interested in Grantaire, and Grantaire is just about positive she'll still be hot in the morning. Drunk and barely introduced is how Grantaire has sex; attempting to interrupt the pattern is tantamount to forcing her into a chastity belt. 

Having Courfeyrac try to cuntblock her is bad enough. That Enjolras would show up halfway through the thing is unspeakable. Enjolras is, she's starting to suspect, destined to bear witness to every single girl Grantaire tries to replace her with; the goddess would not, of course, let such a loyal devotee stray.

"Pardon me," Grantaire resumes, returning her attention to Courfeyrac, one hand in Montparnasse's to help her stay, "if I'd rather get laid than watch _that_ try to glare everyone out of the club." Pointing at Enjolras is a dangerous gamble, balance-wise, but Grantaire is practiced; she gets away with it. "As _scintillating_ at your company would doubtless be, o great one," she adds, flashing Enjolras a sickly smile, "a girl can't live on marble alone." Part of Grantaire realizes that she's just said something she'll probably regret later, but she's too far gone in anger, stress, and drink to care. "Now if you'll excuse me," she gives Montparnasse's hand a tug, and the other girl follows her lead, looking amused, "I have a very important engagement with Parnasse's tongue." Maria looks dumbstruck, and Courfeyrac looks just about ready to kill someone, but Grantaire ignores them, not even looking at Enjolras as she moves to push open the gap in the fence, only requiring a little bit of assistance from Montparnasse to get it open and step through without losing her balance.

It's Montparnasse who pulls the fence closed, smiling first at Courfeyrac and then, for a beat that seems longer than it is, right at Enjolras, her dark lips curling up in a smirk as she lets Grantaire drag her off into the night.

* * *

It isn't long after that before everyone else has lost the mood to party, and the Amis trickle out of Commonwealth in a loosely bound group, Courfeyrac angrily muttering into her phone — she'd called Emile in the hope that his little brother, Gavroche, might be able to track down this Montparnasse without alerting Grantaire to the fact that someone was keeping tabs on her — most of the Amis looking quietly worried, save Bahorel, who demands to know why everyone decided to get boring just because Grantaire wanted a drunk fuck, and Enjolras, who is quiet and stony-faced. Combeferre had frowned when Enjolras had first come back into the club, spine rigid, but her face has since melted into a mask of neutrality, and she leads the group back towards Courfeyrac and Maria's apartment.

Enjolras, personally, does not care who Grantaire goes home with. It's already been made clear, from the encounter a week before, that Grantaire's taste in lovers is about as good as her taste in hobbies and convictions. At least this one had looked like she showered regularly. (Though there was something about Montparnasse that _bothered_ her, the sharp angle of her cheekbones and the smirk she'd worn as she let Grantaire lead her off down the alley. There was something cruel in her beauty, and Enjolras told herself she was wasting worry on a friend who clearly had no regard for her own well-being.) Grantaire barely qualifies as a friend, really. She's rude, disruptive, disrespectful, and perpetually intoxicated. She has no motivation and no belief, and if it weren't for the fact that her friends seem to all inexplicably like her, Enjolras is certain Grantaire wouldn't even be a part of her life.

She is, she's certain, only upset because her friends are. Because she has common human decency, and it was obvious from Grantaire's behaviour that she's in no place to make rational decisions at the moment. Because they were supposed to have a night out as a group. Her mind fixates on small details, the remembered sound of Grantaire's voice through the cracked door, the way she'd looked at Enjolras before letting out that laugh and turning her ire on Enjolras herself, the way Montparnasse's dark red nails had looked clasped around the bony circumference of Grantaire's wrist.

Beside her, Combeferre watches Courfeyrac steadily, the anger visible in the speed and swing of her movements as she walks, the tension in her shoulders as she mutters to Emile. Gradually, her brow has relaxed as the conversation's gone on and now, hanging up, she looks more tired than anything. Neither is a good look on her friend; Courfeyrac is almost always in a good mood, and even when she's distressed she plays it up, dramatizes it. This is pure anger and discontent, and seeing it on Courf for anything less than word from the Harper government is unnerving.

Combeferre raises her eyebrows, waiting, and Courfeyrac sighs. "Apparently Emile knows this Montparnasse girl," she explains, just resisting the urge to pitch her voice low enough that only Combeferre could hear because she knows the others are worried, too. "Emile thinks Grantaire will be fine around her, but he said he'd check in on things." Combeferre presses her lips together in sympathy, sliding an arm around her friend's waist, and Courfeyrac leans down heavily against her, even though Combeferre is a good five inches shorter than Courf even when she's _not_ wearing heels.

"So, now that we've established Grantaire isn't boinking an axe murderer," Bahorel calls from the back of the pack, "can we go back to having fun? Or are we going to go mope over it for the rest of the night? Cause if that's the case, I'm going to bow out and find someone of my own to boink."

Enjolras shoots Bahorel a perturbed look, brow furrowed, but Courfeyrac, as if suddenly reminded of her sacred duty as Life of the Party, straightens up, taking a deep breath before she smiles. "Bahorel, as if you could find anyone whose boinkability outweighed the pleasance of my company." Bahorel scoffs. "We're going to go back to mine and Maria's," she claps an arm around Maria's shoulders, "and we're going to get massively drunk and upset all the neighbours! The booze is cheaper, the company's better, and we have pictionary."

"You know saying 'we have pictionary' is a good way to make people walk _away_ from your party, right?" Bahorel says, an eyebrow raised.

"Nonsense, Bahi Bahi." Courfeyrac gives Maria a squeeze, pressing a kiss to the shorter girl's temple, before flashing Bahorel a smile. "We all know how much you love pictionary, especially if you get to be Feuilly's shitty partner. It's Feuilly who should be backing away; she can actually draw, whereas all of your drawings look like a bad case of pink sock! Now. Come." She turns to face forward again, leading the way in long strides, and it only takes another moment before their friends fall back into conversation — or in Enjolras and Combeferre's cases, reflective silence. Suddenly, Courfeyrac’s steps stagger, and she looks down at Maria in horror, remembering the conversation they'd begun for first time since she'd spotted Grantaire. "Oh no," she breathes, eyes wide. " _Your boy._ "

"It's fine," Maria replies, uncomfortable. She hasn't forgotten the angel in the crowd, but with everything else that’s happened and the look on Enjolras's face after Grantaire had left, Maria hadn't been keen on bringing him up again, even though as they'd left the club she'd strained to try and catch a glimpse of him, _anything._ "I mean, I'm sure I'll see him a-"

Courfeyrac's forefinger is already pressed to Maria's, and she shushes her, pursing out her lips for added effect, shaking her head solemnly. "No, no. Unacceptable. We have at least ten minutes before we get home. Now." Her smile is more natural now, toothy, wide, and dangerous. "Tell me about this boy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh wow, what a clusterfuck. No beta, as per, and I edited this in the wee hours of the morning after a teacup of tequila, so if anything is brutally wrong, let me know. The next chapter should not take six months to produce, as I already have a first draft of the entire fic now (!!!), so it's just a matter of tinkering, fleshing out, paring down, and so on, now.
> 
> If you want to talk to me find me on [tumblr](http://igpykin.tumblr.com). I'm friendly, I swear.


	3. The Floods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enjolras isn’t sure why she agreed to come, save the fact that Courfeyrac would have been put out with her if she hadn’t and Courfeyrac, the only person Enjolras feels comfortable around for several hours’ distance, is who Enjolras wants to be around right now. Still, she can’t shake the sense that there are better things she could be doing as she in no uncertain terms refuses Courfeyrac’s order to dance and watches her friend go off with their coworkers. Courfeyrac throws herself into the heart of the crowd, her arms in the air, and Enjolras leans against the bar, cradling her water, shoulders slouched in a sweatshirt and jeans, surrounded by girls in tight dresses and patterned leggings and tall, thin heels. She’s just about to open her phone and text Combeferre when, out of the corner of eye, she catches a glimpse of dark red curls with a streak of garish green in them. She frowns, looking up. There is no logical reason for Grantaire to be there. The last she heard, Grantaire was staying at a friend’s until her building was cleared to return to. Grantaire should be in Calgary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look! I told you it wouldn't be another seven months before the next update! I am hoping to update this every two weeks max until it's finished, but we'll see how life goes, friends. This chapter, like the last two, is unbeta'd, so if there are any mistakes I am v. v. sorry. Btw, if anyone is actually interested in betaing this fic, please let me know, because I could probably use a good whip.

When it hasn’t been stiflingly hot for the last few weeks, it’s been raining. A fundraiser from Ontario in town for the summer had complained bitterly about Calgary rain, icy cold, and Enjolras had, at the time, been annoyed with them. What sort of rain _isn’t_ cold? (It had later been explained to Enjolras, by a patient and endlessly amused Courfeyrac, that in places where people _don’t_ make igloo jokes all the time, rain can be warm, and even in Ottawa the rain was warmer than theirs. “It’s because we get it so rarely,” Courfeyrac had mock-explained while drinking Enjolras’s coffee. “The Calgary rain has to make sure we pay attention, when it turns up.”)

Enjolras doesn’t care what weather they work in. She’s fundraised in dangerous heat, in -40 windchill, in the middle of thunderstorms and hail. The weather is not her concern; the people they’re trying to help are. So, while the rest of the city has commented on an especially wet spring, Enjolras has learned to take her raincoat to work, and gotten on with life.

But by Friday night in mid-June, there is a deep line between Combeferre’s eyebrows as she frowns down at her laptop, and even Enjolras has to admit, things are getting bad.

The Amies are scattered around the city, though most of them live in the core. Feuilly lives in Bowness with her former foster mother, right next to the river; Joly, Bossuet, Coda, Grantaire, and Emile are all in Kensington within a few blocks of the Bow; Jehan lives in Mission; even for Combeferre and Enjolras — and Courfeyrac and Maria, some blocks away — the rising water levels are worrying. It has been raining for days, and it keeps raining, and it isn’t long before photos of the flooding start to dominate their Twitter feeds. Bahorel has a car, and she picks up Enjolras and Combeferre on her way to Feuilly’s, even as Courfeyrac and Maria make for Jehan’s, all of the Amies mass-texting constant updates as word of evacuation starts to spread.

The next several days are chaos. Feuilly’s place ends up half-underwater. Cars parked around Jehan’s become islands in the lots they were left in. Bahorel, Combeferre, Enjolras, Maria, and Courfeyrac all live in apartments high enough that none of their belongings are directly in danger of water damage, but none of their buildings are safe from the water that spreads through the core, prompting an order from the mayor to stay out of downtown. Grantaire and the others who live in Kensington escape the worst of the flood, and Grantaire jokes that it was an act of God, who clearly knew that all the permafried hipsters wouldn’t know how to recover if their gentrified haven was destroyed. The smile she wears when she says it as they help bail out Feuilly’s basement doesn’t ring true, though, and all of the Amies spend the week worried, stressed, and underslept, the full cost of the floods beyond any of their reckoning.

Worse still is hearing about the damage across the province. Enjolras doesn’t care as much about Banff and Canmore flooding — tourist traps populated by the few who can afford to live there full-time — but High River and other towns have been decimated, and the Siksika Nation is overtaken. Of course, these get less news coverage than affluent Calgary — the story of a couple whose million dollar piano was destroyed is widely circulated — and it drives Enjolras half-mad to know she’s surrounded by people who need her help, outside the city’s boundaries. Still, she stays in Calgary for the worst of the flood, responding to calls for volunteers and making sure her friends, above all, get through the week as best they can. 

It’s the following Thursday when Courfeyrac and Enjolras are called in to work for the first time since the flooding started; with half the roads through the city shut down and its population uprooted in chaos, there’d been no chance of fundraising. All of Calgary’s still in disarray, but they go in anyway, both needing to make rent.

Two hours after they arrive, they’re told that there’s going to be an impromptu work trip to Edmonton. Fundraising in the city right now is impossible, they say, but they want to make sure anyone who can work gets work. They’ll be leaving in two hours, their boss says, for anyone who can go. Travel time will be paid, and their hotel will be covered.

In the end, only Courf, Enjolras, and three others can make it on such short notice, and it’s a quick run for what belongings they’ll need before they’re packed in a van, headed north. Courfeyrac is driving, as one of the only people present with a valid driver’s license and enough seniority at the company to be trusted with the company vehicle, and while Enjolras has several thoughts on Courfeyrac’s trustworthiness when it comes to speeding up Highway 1, she — having never bothered getting her license, insisting transit was adequate and a far better option when it could be taken — is in no position to criticize, as Courfeyrac keeps reminding her.

“I GOT THIS FEELIN ON A SUMMER DAY WHEN YOU WERE GO-ONE,” Courfeyrac shouts, joined by two of their coworkers, while Enjolras frowns down at her phone, checking the latest flood tweets, and their fifth member, a shy 19-year-old who only started two weeks before, stares in bewilderment at the singalong, “I CRASHED MY CAR INTO THE BRIDGE I WATCHED I LET IT BU-URN! I THREW YOUR SHIT INTO A BAG AND PUSHED IT DOWN THE STA-AIRS! I CRASHED MY CAR INTO A BRIDGE! _I DON’T CARE!_ ”

It has been like this, music blasting and Courfeyrac knowing the words to every obnoxious pop song that comes on the radio or is played from an offered iPhone, for the last hour. Enjolras would mention that perhaps singing about crashing your car is inadvisable when you’re driving a van full of coworkers, but adding to Courfeyrac’s list of distractions while driving — or, god forbid, trying to turn the music down again, which had only made Courfeyrac turn it up louder and _scream_ along — doesn’t seem worth it.

Enjolras has not been to Edmonton since she was a child. Her parents had taken her to the mall when she was 9, paying for a lavish theme room at the hotel, and she had never seen reason to return. She isn’t a participant in the fierce rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton, but her life is in Calgary and she’s always been far more concerned with setting her sights on further horizons of injustice, rather than taking a three-hour trip to the capital city to walk through North America’s largest mall and watch tourists waste their money on frivolous goods produced by what very nearly amounts to slave labour.

The clouds darken as they drive on, making a pitstop in Red Deer — “DEAD DEER!” Courfeyrac joyously announces as they drive through darkened streets in searching of The Liquor Hutch, not the closest liquor store to their route but the one with the most compelling name — utterly failing to find The Liquor Hutch but making several illegal U-Turns, almost running into a parked car, and finally settling for a Liquor Depot in the process. Enjolras waits in the car, where her phone is charging — “It doesn’t even have _music_ on it, Enjolras, you aren’t allowed to use our energy when you can’t even give us _music_.” — while her coworkers file in to stock up. Most of them are out quickly enough, with beer or or gin or vodka and mix in hand, but it takes Courfeyrac a full 20 minutes to make her selections, emerging with an array of worryingly bright-coloured liqueurs and coolers, along with the phone numbers of three very drunk men who’d been in the store. Enjolras shoots the stash a dubious look before raising her eyebrow at Courfeyrac. “How much of your food stipend did you just spend?”

Courfeyrac just smiles, turns the music back on, and resumes driving.

By the time they’re on the outskirts of Edmonton, they’re in the middle of a full-fledged storm, lightening forking down into the prairies that surround them, illuminating the sky in a sickly bright purple. Enjolras continues texting Combeferre and compulsively checking Twitter and her email while Courfeyrac focuses on the road, the music turned down to accommodate their growing fatigue and the excess concentration the storm is demanding from Courf. They wait in the parking lot of the motel they managed to book while Enjolras checks in before they all bolt for the entry, trying to take as much of their luggage — personal items, work materials, alcohol, candy, chips, and beef jerky — in one go as they can, drenched by the downpour and dripping all over the worn lobby carpet. They’re split into two rooms — their three coworkers in one, and Enjolras mercifully only stuck with Courfeyrac in the other — and as Courf migrates to the other room to chat with their coworkers and drink, Enjolras stays in their room alone, taking out her laptop to catch up on the news and work on a blog post about the worrying disparity in flood coverage when it comes to the plight of the Siksikawa. By the time Courfeyrac wanders back in, eyeliner smudged with the late hour and fatigue finally caught up with her, Enjolras is deep in writing mode, barely nodding at her friend before returning her full attention to the words on the screen. It’s nearly four before Enjolras finally closes her laptop, curling up next to it and going to sleep.

* * *

In Calgary, most of the people who refuse to donate can afford to, in Enjolras’s experience. She has already had The Talk with Combeferre — one can’t gauge a stranger’s financial situation by the size of their garage or the inches their television screens encompass — but as far as Enjolras is concerned, if someone working in oil and gas and living in a sprawling suburban house is struggling financially because they decided to buy too many iPhones or take too many vacations to Mexican resorts, they do not deserve her sympathy. It’s symptomatic of broader inequalities, of course — the pervasive messaging to buy and buy more, to live like you want to regardless of the consequences — but Enjolras has trouble sympathizing with those willing to waste their money on conspicuous consumption when she knows so many are struggling to survive because they were born in the wrong place, or the wrong body. Having wealthy young professionals insist they simply don’t have an extra $15 to spare per month is infuriating in its own way, and Enjolras has traditionally not dealt well with this phenomenon, but in Edmonton, a different sort of dissatisfaction sets in.

They’re working blue collar neighbourhoods, and are met with warmth and enthusiasm by many of the people they talk to. But while the people Enjolras speaks with are enthusiastic about the charity, none of them agree to donate, and they all seem to have valid financial reasons not to do so. There’s the man with a severely autistic brother who’s thrilled to see her promoting human rights but makes all his money off an independent antiques store, and has to support both his ill wife and his brother on what money he makes. His porch has a foot-wide hole in it that Enjolras almost walks right into. There’s the woman who warmly listens to everything Enjolras has to say, but is already in debt and giving $200 a month to various charities. There’s a Nigerian student due to start school in September who doesn’t have a summer job yet, who reluctantly agrees to a phone follow-up in October, but whose shoulders stay slumped as Enjolras talks to him, and there’s no sense of victory at the paperwork as she walks away from his home.

Top that off with the man who, upon hearing Enjolras talk about systematic violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, sullenly says, “That’s women in _Mexico_ , not my fucking problem,” and refuses to listen to Enjolras’s statistics on the work the charity does in Canada, and by lunch, her lips are tightly pursed in frustration, her head a whirlwind of irritation. Edmonton has been a more interesting experience than Enjolras had banked on, but it’s also been a new kind of headache she hadn’t really wanted. They take a subdued lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant — no one has had a good morning, with only two $15 donations so far — and Enjolras broods into her Pho as Courfeyrac adds every possible spice and sauce on the table to her meal.

* * *

By the end of the week, they’ve had more success, though all of them are pulling in far fewer donations than usual, and most of them are ready to let off some steam. Enjolras is ready to go home and find something _useful_ to do — there are so many flood victims who need help, and she misses Combeferre’s at her side more than she’d thought she would, unused to being away from her friend for more than a matter of hours at a time — but she’s dragged out anyway, as Courfeyrac, official supervisor for the trip and far better at pep talks than Enjolras, does her best to cheer the team up. “You know, this wasn’t a planned trip,” she says over pizza. “We’re making the best of some difficult circumstances, and I’m really proud of all of you for putting yourselves out there and working so hard. We’ve all done really well in unfamiliar territory, and we’ve all earned a break.” She slides her arm around Enjolras’s shoulders, squeezing and smiling fondly. “Even those of us who don’t understand what breaks are.”

Whyte Avenue is notorious for its nightlife, a parallel to 17th Avenue in Calgary. Enjolras had not banked, however, on just how much more _intense_ Whyte Avenue would be. While Calgary’s nightlife is spread across the core, everyone in Edmonton looking to get drunk seems to migrate to Whyte Avenue on a Friday night, and Courfeyrac takes her hand and one of their coworkers’ to help keep them together as they make their way through crowds of people who have clearly had more of a headstart than any of them. It’s a mess of humanity, brightly coloured, stumbling, interspersed with buskers, and as Enjolras stares at a group of bikers hanging around a parking lot, a few straddling their bikes and holding up signs that say “Free Hugs,” she can’t help but wonder why it’s so easy to get these numbers for _bars_ but so difficult to gather them for anything that _matters._ They end up in a club with massive front windows, the dancing crowd inside readily visible from the street, and as Enjolras sips at her water and the others take their drinks to the floor, she cannot help but feel out of place in a way she never has at similarly irritating clubs in Calgary.

Enjolras isn’t sure why she agreed to come, save the fact that Courfeyrac would have been put out with her if she hadn’t and Courfeyrac, the only person Enjolras feels comfortable around for several hours’ distance, is who Enjolras wants to be around right now. Still, she can’t shake the sense that there are better things she could be doing as she in no uncertain terms refuses Courfeyrac’s order to dance and watches her friend go off with their coworkers. Courfeyrac throws herself into the heart of the crowd, her arms in the air, and Enjolras leans against the bar, cradling her water, shoulders slouched in a sweatshirt and jeans, surrounded by girls in tight dresses and patterned leggings and tall, thin heels. It isn’t as if Enjolras wants to be one of them — there are more important things for her to use her resources on than clothing that’s neither comfortable nor practical, and more valuable uses of her time than learning how to apply razor-thin eyeliner and dark lips — but it’s impossible not to feel out of place here, wondering how people dance to music that seems to be an unrelated series of beeps, and how long it will be before one of the drunker ones falls over. She’s just about to open her phone and text Combeferre when, out of the corner of eye, she catches a glimpse of dark red curls with a streak of garish green in them. She frowns, looking up. There is no logical reason for Grantaire to be there. The last she heard, Grantaire was staying at a friend’s until her building was cleared to return to. Grantaire should be in Calgary.

But there Grantaire is, smile wide, dancing up against a girl who Enjolras recognizes as _the_ girl — Montparnasse — who smirked at her not two weeks before, and suddenly Enjolras is battling an icy cold feeling about the _friend_ who’s been hosting Grantaire.

She looks, Enjolras realizes, happy. This isn’t an entirely uncommon sight — Enjolras knows Grantaire loves their friends just as much as they love her, maybe more, and she’s at her best when she’s having fun with them, telling jokes and coaxing out the story of Bahorel’s latest conquest, to the general merriment of all except Enjolras — but it’s rare for her to really see Grantaire like this. Grantaire’s always more guarded around Enjolras than around the rest of them; Enjolras assumes this is because Grantaire thinks she’s a temperamental hypocrite with too much naivety and not enough sense. Usually, when Grantaire is in this good of a mood, Enjolras is taking care not to pay attention, to try and focus on her work while her friends relax. Now, surrounded by strangers and with Courfeyrac off dancing, with only her phone as a gateway to anything meaningful, she is taken off guard by the sudden presence of Grantaire where she shouldn’t be. Enjolras can’t help but stare, jaw tight and brow furrowed, as Grantaire grinds up against the other girl, smile wide and sharp at the corners, a bottle raised in one hand and her shirt riding up her torso. Enjolras never really noticed before just how thin Grantaire is; her hipbones look too sharp on her torso, the shadows around them too stark even in the club light.

…which is stupid, because that’s body shaming and Enjolras has no interest in that. Still, she thinks, it’s not an _aesthetic_ condemnation; she just wonders, suddenly, how often Grantaire replaces meals with drinks, and feels a twinge of something too-tight in her chest.

Montparnasse notices her before Grantaire does, and gives Enjolras another one of those slow, knowing smirks, sliding her hand up from Grantaire’s hip to her stomach, rucking it up, exposing more pale skin beneath the dark fabric. It occurs to Enjolras that Grantaire is dressed much more nicely than she usually is, and she wonders how much of it is due to Montparnasse, who once again looks like she’s never had a hair out of place in her life. A moment later, after turning her head to smile at Montparnasse, almost sneaking a kiss before she gets distracted by the other woman’s line of sight, Grantaire finally notices Enjolras, and stops moving save the straightening of her spine and sudden stricken look on her face. Enjolras sees Grantaire’s bottle slip a few inches in her grip before she catches it by the neck, and wonders at the reaction — is she that drunk?

A moment later, after Enjolras swallows and nods, once, reluctantly making eye contact with Montparnasse again — her smile widens as she runs her hand back down Grantaire’s torso, to her hip — Grantaire turns to Montparnasse, saying something into her ear that makes the smirk fade. She kisses the other girl deeply before turning to approach Enjolras, and as Grantaire reaches her the smirk is back on Parnasse’s face as she leans against the wall to survey the crowd, and Enjolras has that sick twinge just between her lungs again.

“What the fuck,” Grantaire says, just loud enough to be heard over the music, staring at Enjolras. Enjolras feels unexpectedly uncomfortable and shrugs, glancing down at her water before looking back at Grantaire.

“Work,” she answers. “What the fuck yourself.”

A smile flashes across Grantaire’s face, sudden and bright, like she’d worn when she was dancing up against Montparnasse, and Enjolras resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Pleasure,” she replies, running a forefinger up the neck of her bottle. Enjolras tightens her grip on her water before sipping it, eyebrows rising for a beat before settling again.

“You wanna come out for a smoke?” Grantaire asks, tilting her head. Enjolras’s eyes flicker back to Montparnasse against the wall, but the other woman seems unconcerned, browsing her phone the way Enjolras would have been if she hadn’t spotted Grantaire. (Montparnasse looks, Enjolras knows, far smoother doing so; the glide of her fingers over the screen is unhurried, her posture relaxed, her face impassive. Enjolras would have her brow furrowed and her shoulders curled towards the phone, a frown etched on her face. She feels much younger than she is, all of a sudden.)

“I don’t smoke,” she replies, letting the annoyance thread through her voice. Grantaire knows exactly what Enjolras thinks of her smoking; they’ve had the discussion at very high volumes, on several occasions. Still, when Enjolras looks back at Grantaire, she’s smiling, crooked and almost fond — but that’s probably not the word for it — and she shrugs, reaching into her pocket for a beautifully engraved cigarette tin Enjolras doesn’t remember her having, shaking out a cigarette and stashing it behind her ear, stuffing the case back in her uncharacteristically tight jeans, draining her bottle, and flashing Enjolras another wide smile.

“Come with me anyway,” she says, and reaches for Enjolras’s water to set it on the bar behind her, taking Enjolras’s hand a moment later and pulling her along. The contact feels strange to Enjolras, who barely touches anyone save Combeferre (who is practically her comfort blanket, in private), and Courfeyrac (who touches everyone). She thinks Grantaire’s fingers are unusually tense around her hand, her shoulders a little too rigid, but she leads Enjolras on easily enough, through the crowd and out the door, flashing a grin at the bouncer and telling him to save some space for them, they’ll just be a few minutes. All of a sudden they’re out of the mass of sweaty dancing bodies and among the less tightly packed mass of roaming bodies, passing by a girl who’s getting sick in between buildings, partially supported by her friends. Grantaire takes the cigarette out from behind her ear and lets it hang from her lips, taking out the zippo lighter that Enjolras mercifully recognizes and lighting it, Enjolras’s hand released now, her pace never faltering. She walks them until they’re at an intersection across from a man who’s using a series of pedals to record and replay his own voice several times over and make a song of it, a guitar hanging from his shoulders, and Grantaire leans against an unoccupied wall, smirking slightly at Enjolras. Enjolras wonders if she’s cold in that tanktop.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Grantaire drawls, the smirk only faltering for a moment at Enjolras’s bemused stare before it reasserts itself, lips pursing around a drag of her cigarette. She exhales a cloud of smoke into the night air and lets her eyes slide over the people around them, lingering on the busker, and for lack of anything better to do, Enjolras leans against the wall next to Grantaire, following her gaze. She does not notice the minute tensing of Grantaire’s shoulders, too aware of the minimal space between them to note anyone’s body language but her own.

There’s a long pause, where Grantaire smokes and the busker plays and they let the sounds of the crowd wash over them before, smile so faint it’s almost undetectable, Enjolras speaks, eyes still on the busker.

“You know there are clubs in Calgary, right?”

Grantaire lets out a little exhalation of laughter that’s maybe a third smoke, a third amusement, and a third bitterness. “I’d know better than you,” she points out, taking another long drag, eyes on Enjolras’s profile before she lets them slide back to the busker. “You know there’s more money in Calgary, right?”

Enjolras bristles at the comment, but a moment later a thought occurs to her and, too taken up by the surreal feeling of the exchange and the month’s fatigue, she asks, “Can you actually afford $60 a month?”

This time, she notices Grantaire tense, and is torn between more annoyance and that sick sad feeling in her chest she can’t place, but a moment later, Grantaire has pushed off the wall, tossing her butt into the gutter (and _then_ Enjolras opts for annoyance), and blowing another cloud of smoke into the night, eyes on the distant crowd. “Come on,” she says. “You don’t like the club. And _yes_ , Enjolras, I’m capable of figuring out what you’d like more.” She’s already making for the crosswalk as she mutters, “I’m capable of that much,” more to herself than anything, though Enjolras hears it, and feels the twinge again. They pause by the busker long enough for Grantaire to drop a toonie into his case, offering him a smile and a compliment Enjolras only half-understands, something about loops, before Grantaire leads her on. Enjolras feels a buzz in her pocket and takes out her phone, reading a text from Courfeyrac — “?????????!” — to which she replies “Walk with Grantaire.” She puts her phone on silent before sliding it back into her pocket, trying not to notice how Grantaire had slowed her pace to let Enjolras catch up, another cigarette already dangling from her lips.

“What do you think?” Grantaire asks suddenly, eyes on the crowds, the clubs, the food vendors, the buskers, anywhere but her. Enjolras is unused to Grantaire leading, and a little surprised by how she has to hurry her steps to keep up with Grantaire, though not _that_ surprised; Grantaire’s always been quicker than she likes to let on, and it’s no surprise that that applies in more ways than one.

“About?” Enjolras asks, brow furrowed, and Grantaire shoots her an amused look, eyes flicking up and down her face, before taking another drag, exhaling as she gestures, the cigarette perched between two knuckles.

“This. Edmonton. Whyte Ave. Hub of debauchery. Modern day multi-venue bacchanal. STIs and addictions and daddy issues ahoy.” She glances at Enjolras again, lips curved in a wry smirk. “I’m surprised Courfeyrac talked you into this. I’m assuming she talked you into this?”

The set of Enjolras’s lips is answer enough, but she nods. “It was decided that a work trip in Edmonton without a non-work trip to Whyte Avenue would be an unforgivable sin. I was informed I would be dead to Courfeyrac in spirit and mind alike if I refused.”

Grantaire lets out another little laugh, less painful than the last, her pace slowing as they approach a group of buskers lined up along a chainlink fence, some playing together, some talking off to the side, holding their instruments. “Surprised you came. Normally you can glare her into submission.”

There’s a hint of that glare as Enjolras turns to look at Grantaire, but a moment later it’s gone, her eyes back on the buskers, standing firm amongst the steady stream of people veering around them. “It’s strange being out of Calgary,” she admits, arms crossed loosely over her stomach. Grantaire shoots her a look, but forces her attention back to the buskers.

“That’s going to make the whole ‘travel the world saving it’ thing a little difficult,” she points out, though her tone isn’t unkind. She takes a long drag, burning her cigarette to the filter before tossing it aside, and Enjolras pushes down the urge to go and pick it up, to yell at Grantaire, to do _something_ that makes her feel more like herself.

“I don’t need to travel the world to protest injustice,” she says instead, arms crossed a little more tightly. “Besides, if there was a valid reason for me being here, it would be fine. We’re only here because no one in Calgary will donate money to us, with the flooding.” Enjolras has more trouble blaming people for that than she usually does; she knows that the damage done to Feuilly’s house feels much more pressing than the prohibitive cost of gender reassignment surgery, even if she knows the latter issue affects more people, should be more important. _Is_ more important.

But it doesn’t feel that way when she sees the dark circles under Feuilly’s eyes as she helps her and her foster mother make calls around the city to find out about aid and insurance.

They’re silent for a long moment before Grantaire replies, softly. “Maybe you need to make your own reason to be here,” she says, mimicking Enjolras’s posture, arms crossed. “Life doesn’t always make sense, Enjolras. If you end up somewhere you don’t want to be, you just have to find a way to make that place worth being. To make it better.” She smirks slightly, though it’s only a ghost of her usual mocking expressions, looking sidelong at her friend. “Isn’t that your line?”

Enjolras smiles faintly, meeting Grantaire’s eyes for the first time in a while. “I suppose it is,” she admits, and there might have been a change in the air between them — or a charge — but all of a sudden a man is standing at Enjolras’s side, smiling down — indeed, trying to smile all the way down her top, and Enjolras feels a surge of anger, looking up at him. “How are you ladies tonight?” the man asks, smiling at both of them.

“Content without the invasion of your company,” Enjolras replies, a current of dangerous heat beneath the words, though the man doesn’t seem to process it. He grins instead, raising his eyebrows. They are thick and dark, like Grantaire’s, but while the long arches of Grantaire’s eyebrows help make her face expressive and dynamic, these are more like blocks shading his eyes, making him look churlish.

“Come again?”

“Have either of us giving any indication we want to talk to you?” Enjolras asks through grit teeth, and he has the audacity to look not only surprised, but amused.

“You don’t even know me yet, beautiful! How do you know if you want to talk to me?” One moment, his hand is moving for her hip, and the next, Grantaire is between them, slim shoulders squared as she leans up into him, hissing her words.

“She said she doesn’t want to talk to you, idiot. There are plenty of girls with bottom of the barrel standards around here. Go find one of them.”

The man doesn’t look amused anymore. “Did I ask for your opinion, you little dy-”

A moment later, he’s clutching his testicles, swearing vehemently, and Enjolras is dragging Grantaire away before any of the many bike cops she’s seen that evening catch sight of them.

“I didn’t know you did that,” Grantaire said, sounding a bit dumbstruck as Enjolras pulls her along, mouth set and glare dark as they move through the crowd, back to the club. Enjolras doesn’t bother replying, just keeps pulling Grantaire along, until they’re safely back among the dancers. She spots Courfeyrac and one of their coworkers talking to Montparnasse at the bar, and she doesn’t let go of Grantaire’s wrist until they’re barely a foot away, still taut with anger as she leans forward to order another water. Grantaire stares at Enjolras for a moment before staring at the rest of them, and takes staggered steps back to Montparnasse’s side, as though she’s not quite moving of her own volition. Courfeyrac looks between the two of them, clearly worried, but neither woman seems inclined to explain.

A few minutes later, after a shaky attempt at conversation with Courfeyrac, her eyes repeatedly darting to Enjolras, who seems content to glare at the bottles behind the bar, Grantaire drags Montparnasse back off to a dark corner, where they kiss with very little regard for how many people are around them and how much those people may be opposed to seeing just how much of Grantaire’s ass can be shown off by her jeans. Only then does Enjolras turn around, shooting the pair a dark look before she looks at Courfeyrac with something resembling the resolve that precedes a decision to stage a protest, or write a very angry letter, or hold an emergency meeting.

“We’re going to dance,” she informs Courfeyrac, who would smile if it were any of her other friends, if she wasn’t busy worrying that Enjolras may have had some sort of aneurysm while out with Grantaire. It seems possible; there _has_ been a pool on how long it would be before Grantaire sent Enjolras into some sort of nervous breakdown for some time now. She tries to calculate who would win, if tonight was the night. She thinks it might be Joly.

“Oh?” When none of the resolve leaves Enjolras’s face, she nods, slowly. “Cool. In that case… Tequila!”

Normally Enjolras would object, but she’s already shot through with nervousness at the prospect of trying to do something she usually tries to avoid doing at all costs. What’s another dark mark on her dignity, at this point? Two birds, one stone, as the saying goes. Lips a thin line, she nods, and Courfeyrac tries to push down her unease as she leans over the bar to order shots.

* * *

Not long after Grantaire watches Enjolras take the shots Courfeyrac bought — a heroic effort, she thinks, given the obvious distaste on her face after she downs them, face contorting like a cat’s upon smelling citrus — and she sees them move to the dance floor, that she and Montparnasse leave. Enjolras is a terrible dancer. It was clear she was putting effort in, but she consistently missed or was thrown off the beat, moving ever-so-slightly out of time. Her hips didn’t sway the way Courfeyrac’s do, she didn’t grind down to the beat with the ruthless precision of Montparnasse, but Grantaire couldn’t keep her eyes off of Enjolras as Parnasse kissed down her neck, hands moving down her sides to slide under her shirt, and Enjolras never even glanced Grantaire’s way, so Grantaire told Parnasse she wanted to go back to the hotel.

They stop on the street, several times. They’ll need to catch a cab — neither of them have been good to drive for hours, and Parnasse seems utterly unconcerned about the wellbeing of the car she left parked a few blocks away — but it’s hard to focus on hailing one down when Montparnasse’s lips are on her throat, when her long nails graze down Grantaire’s hips, her fingers slim and sure on her skin. It has not escaped Grantaire’s notice that there are crucial similarities between Enjolras and Parnasse. They both beg to be reproduced, though Enjolras would be oils, movement and colour and texture, where Parnasse demands other mediums — a mix of charcoal and collage, maybe, with acrylics to string it together, shadows and fragments, unnerving and dark in a way Enjolras can never be, because even when she’s furious and dangerous, she’s always lit up, driven by something higher than herself. They are both horribly beautiful, Parnasse’s lines harsher than Enjolras’s, her eyes sharply lined and her lips always painted, the contrast between her straight dark hair and her pale skin jarring where Enjolras’s long waves of blonde hair and flushed cheeks speak of youth and fertility and a strange softness that contrasts the brutal passion that drives her. The most important difference between the two of them, though, is that Montparnasse seems to want Grantaire — Grantaire suspects it’s because Parnasse, who knows more about the underbelly of humanity than Enjolras ever could, no matter how much she researches it, loves a good trainwreck — and so it’s Montparnasse pinning Grantaire to a brick alley wall.

Grantaire isn’t sure what Montparnasse makes of her and Enjolras. She knows it’s obvious to everyone but Enjolras that Grantaire is painfully in love with the blonde, and that Montparnasse is too sharp not to have noticed. If nothing else, Montparnasse has been in Grantaire’s room, seen the sketches and the paintings that are all long straight noses and golden hair and soft curves, the ones she takes care to cover up when their friends are there but never thinks to hide for one night stands. (But Montparnasse didn’t get bored of her after one night. She wanted more, and there’s just enough danger in her for Grantaire to want her back.) Sometimes, on the bad days, Grantaire thinks Enjolras notices too, has just chosen to ignore her, out of mercy or cruelty she isn’t sure. When Montparnasse draws up from her neck to look her in the eyes, pupils blown and teeth just visible between her parted lips, Grantaire can see her note the unease on her face, and she kisses it away a moment later, fierce and unrelenting, tongue sliding between Grantaire’s lips and pressing into the contours of her mouth, her knee sliding between Grantaire’s and pressing up, wiping all thoughts of Enjolras from Grantaire’s mind for a heartbeat or two.

The cab ride is a blur, Grantaire’s body heavy with drink and the fadeout of other buzzes, but Montparnasse doesn’t seem to notice how sluggish Grantaire’s nerves are, the clumsiness of her tongue. They press up against each other and the cab driver ignores them beyond a sharp order to watch the upholstery. Grantaire doesn’t know it, but the hotel they’re staying in is much nicer than the one Enjolras will go home to; somehow, Parnasse always seems to be able to afford next to the best, and Grantaire is happy to leave the question of how unasked, as with most other questions between them. Somehow back in their room and still upright, Grantaire rucks Parnasse’s skirt up as Parnasse pushes Grantaire’s jeans down her hips, their movements parallel opposites, and Grantaire gives up on sense and lets sensation take over as Parnasse’s teeth return to her neck.

(Grantaire has noticed, for all of Montparnasse’s sharp edges, for all the biting and the scratches, she never leaves marks above the collar, below the upper few inches of her arms. Another question unasked.)

When they sleep together — and they have, and the bed in the hotel is heavenly soft, pillowy and vast and infinitely better to share than Grantaire’s — sometimes Grantaire can’t help herself, pretends it’s Enjolras’s sleeping body next to hers. But when they are like this — when it’s bruising and kissing and the steady path of Montparnasse’s hand up her thigh, sliding to close over the modest curve of her ass — it is only Montparnasse Grantaire’s aware of. This isn’t always true of the people Grantaire sleeps with — she’s picked up too many girls with long blonde hair, trying to ignore the asymmetry of their features, their crooked noses and the makeup caked on their skin — but Montparnasse commands attention just as surely Enjolras does, even if the attention is less reverent. This is not to say Enjolras leaves Grantaire’s mind completely. She never seems to. Even as Grantaire’s neck arches up, the crown of her head brushing against the cream paint of the wall, as Montparnasse moves lower, pushing at Grantaire’s collar to take a nipple in and suck, Grantaire remembers Enjolras dancing, puzzles over the white of her teeth bared at the shots, feels a variation on the usual ache in her chest at the new knowledge that even when Grantaire runs away, Enjolras is still _there_ , literally, cannot be escaped no matter where Grantaire goes. But she knows that she is _with Parnasse_ , that it’s her long slim limbs to be caressed, that it’s her lower, raspier voice that Grantaire will draw curses from tonight. All considered, it’s not a half-bad fate. Better than Grantaire’s fate has been in a long time.

A moment later, she has Parnasse pinned to the wall. The simple, short black dress her lover wore tonight — Montparnasse is a great fan of the little black dress — is still on, wrinkles she’d never allow in public marring the fabric at the steady upwards path of Grantaire’s hands, sliding over smooth skin and black lace. Grantaire slides long bony fingers with callused pads under the waist of Montparnasse’s impractical but well-fitted and _very_ flattering underthings and slides them down, eyes intent for all the substances coursing through her blood as she marks the shuttering of Montparnasse’s eyelids, dark lashes resting against smooth, pale cheeks. Sometimes, Grantaire can spot a conscious effort on Parnasse’s part to lose herself when they make love. It reminds Grantaire of the resolve she feels when she heads to the bar for shots after Enjolras has been especially terrible. It evokes a strange tenderness in Grantaire, makes her want to absolve Montparnasse of whatever she’s running from, to grant the other woman the peace she can’t find herself. Instead, she adjusts the alignment of her hips to match Parnasse’s, slides a finger in between her legs and marks the curve of her lover’s jaw as it slackens slightly, as she draws her finger forward, beckoning, the callus of her middle finger grazing Parnasse’s clit. She is wet, though not as wet as Grantaire’s had her, and the gap between her slim thighs widens, her posture slackening as Parnasse’s body lowers, seeking out the pressure of Grantaire’s hand. Grantaire works her for a while, grazing again and again over Parnasse’s clit, feeling her harden, letting the other woman dig her nails deeper and deeper into the flesh of Grantaire’s back. There will be marks, and tomorrow Grantaire will be able to lean back on them and remind herself that she is wanted, that this happened. Grantaire kisses her, their mouths open and hot against each other, and she takes joy in messing up Parnasse’s perfectly applied long-lasting no-smudge lipstick. No lipstick was made to withstand this kind of kissing.

She pulls Parnasse back to the bed and Parnasse, almost always in control, lets Grantaire push her down. Grantaire settles between Parnasse’s spread thighs after her heels have been dropped to the carpet and her panties tossed beside the bedstand. There are parts of the picture Grantaire would alter — Parnasse’s bra is still on, perfectly fitted, and though Grantaire can see the peaks of her nipples through the fabric of her dress, she would have one breast exposed above the neckline, would have Parnasse gazing up at her instead of lying with her eyes shut, brows minutely furrowed — but there is little to complain about as she slides her fingers into Parnasse, curling them up inside of her, the rough pad of her thumb running over her clit as her fingers work her inside out. Grantaire can handle any equipment well enough, in these situations, but there’s something more satisfying about the way Parnasse’s back arches up from the bed, as Grantaire’s fingers move inside of her; there’s no mystery to a hard cock, no challenging in bringing it to climax. The artist in Grantaire — the technician — takes pride in how well she can work a girl, in the coordination of fingers inside and thumb out. It is only a few minutes more before she pushes Parnasse’s dress up higher, kissing her way up Parnasse’s stomach before Parnasse, frustrated, sits up, her cunt tight around Grantaire’s fingers, to toss the dress away, kissing Grantaire hard and dragging her on top, long nails digging into Grantaire’s shoulders. A moment later, Grantaire’s shirt is gone, her small breasts exposed, and the mild chill of the air-conditioned room is at once exhilarating and sobering, the space closed between them to breed warmth as Grantaire presses up harder inside of her, dragging ragged moans from Montparnasse’s finely shaped mouth.

They never say each other’s names when they do this. Grantaire thinks it’s better that way.

Montparnasse never uses her fingers inside of Grantaire — it would ruin Parnasse’s manicure and Grantaire’s cunt — but her tongue is skilled, and when all that’s left is Parnasse’s bra, which Grantaire unclasps with a vengeful swipe of one hand, Parnasse begins to kiss her way down, teeth sharp and tongue pointed. Grantaire lets herself relax, pressing her body down into the softness of the borrowed bed, letting her hips arch up as they want to when Parnasse kisses over the short, sharp stubble filling in between Grantaire’s legs, opening her mouth against it, as though the little pinpricks warrant more affection than the comparative softness of Grantaire’s stomach, sucking Grantaire’s skin into her mouth in long, slow, languorous breaths, running her tongue up between Grantaire’s lips only once Grantaire is enclosed within the wet warmth of Montparnasse’s mouth. Grantaire doesn’t slide her hand into Montparnasse’s hair, which even now, spread over Grantaire’s thighs, is maddeningly straight and shining. Instead, she closes her fingers in the bedsheets beside her hips, clutching them as Parnasse flicks her tongue over her and over again, here fast, here slow, never giving Grantaire the chance to acclimatize. Her tongue is just as demanding as the rest of her. When Montparnasse’s teeth drag over Grantaire’s skin — hard enough to hold a threat, but never sharp enough to hurt — Grantaire knows that if there’s anyone in the rooms next to them, they can hear her, and the thought is satisfying, makes her moan more openly. They entangle themselves fully soon enough, Parnasse’s legs spread over Grantaire’s face so all Grantaire can do is lick up in helpless gratitude, into Parnasse, as Parnasse holds Grantaire’s hips down, nails digging into the crook of her thigh as her tongue dives inside and across her, marking paths too fast and unpredictable for Grantaire to map. The taste of Parnasse is everywhere, sharp and strong, and Grantaire opens her mouth ever wider against her, seeking more, seeing if she can sweep herself away in it, an unremarkable corpse in an inexorable current.

When they fall asleep, they do so side by side, Montparnasse’s underwear on again, Grantaire naked. They do not face each other — Grantaire turns to the window, Parnasse to the door — and they do not touch. But it’s enough, it’s nice, having the slight weight and heat of a body next to her, and Grantaire lets herself pretend, her head heavy with drink and the aftermath of her own satisfaction, mouth still full of the taste of Parnasse, that it’s Enjolras beside her. She thinks Enjolras might be the same way, if she ever lowered herself to Grantaire’s level: a fuck and then a functional sharing of space, no misleading arm around her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As per always, I am on [tumblr](http://igpykin.tumblr.com) if you have any inquiries, comments, or desires for friendship. I will probably be posting some photos of the Alberta floods and Whyte Ave later tonight, so you can peruse that under my [tag](http://igpykin.tumblr.com/tagged/chinook+arch). If you would like to donate to help out the Siksika Nation or High River, [here](http://siksikanation.com/wp/donate/) are a couple [links](http://www.highriver.ca/index.php/en/local-state-of-emergency) for you. If you'd like to learn more about violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, read [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_homicides_in_Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez). Also, if I have tremendously fucked anything up here please let me know.


	4. Of obtuse masochists and unknown parallels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Get out,” Enjolras says finally, a moment before Courfeyrac’s lips pursed pre-action can put forth any words. If she sees the worried, pained looks of her friends between them, she ignores them. She has eyes only for Grantaire, and even with the sting of Enjolras’s words, the crushing sense of fatality, Grantaire can’t help but get a thrill from it.
> 
> “Why should I?” Grantaire’s voice is surprisingly steady, all considered, and she barely notices the minute graze of Joly’s fingertips on her forearm, doesn’t register her own rejection of the comfort, jerking away from the touch. “I’m the one who works here. Not my fault a bunch of uppity activists invaded.”

Courfeyrac is, of course, surrounded by obtuse masochists. It’s fine, because Courfeyrac is surrounded by obtuse masochists that she _loves_ , but she’s still surrounded by obtuse masochists. There is Enjolras, who requires regular reminders from her friends that she can’t actually survive on coffee and righteous rage alone, and who Courf is pretty sure wants to have really angry hatesex with Grantaire and has spectacularly failed to notice this fact about herself for going on two years. There is Grantaire, who routinely fails to realize she’s part of the glue that holds the Amies together, and who has also failed to realize that if she just _seduced_ Enjolras she’d get away with it. (Seriously. Courfeyrac has given Grantaire Seduction Plans before. There were diagrams. They would have worked.) There is Bossuet, who somehow manages to trip over her own feet despite never wearing heels (Joly’s orders), but then again, Bossuet also has two really hot boyfriends who love her, so maybe Bossuet isn’t so obtuse. Maria is not obtuse, but thinks she is, which is the most infuriating display of obtuse masochism of them all. Combeferre is not at all obtuse, nor is Jehan, and Courfeyrac wholeheartedly believes they are double-handedly responsible for keeping her from smashing their obtuse friends’ heads into Enlightenment and Reason by force all this time. 

It’s also entirely possible that Courfeyrac is an obtuse masochist, judging by the massive hangover and absolute lack of sleep she takes with her on the drive back to Calgary. It is clear, from Enjolras’s repeated and frequent _judgy looks_ , that Enjolras is of the opinion that Courfeyrac is obtuse. But, as Enjolras is obtuse, she is clearly in no position to lay down judgment. She is in the _opposite position_ of that position. Courfeyrac takes her revenge by making numerous caffeine stops — including, memorably, a McDonalds in Olds, which earns her 20 minutes of Enjolras glaring at her after they’ve driven away, having already lectured Courfeyrac and the others on responsible consumer choices before Courf had ignored her and ordered four coffee frappuccinos — and playing the music very, very loud, even though it makes Courf’s head ache even more. She sings along with gleeful vindictiveness, until Enjolras resumes sulking with her phone.

And, once all their little minions have been dropped off safe at home, Courfeyrac gives Enjolras an enthusiastic hug that is perhaps more melodramatic than the circumstances demand, crying “ _We made it!_ ” with a hearty stage sob. Courfeyrac can tell, from the way Enjolras’s frown is fighting for its life against a minute upwards quirk at the left side, that all is more or less forgiven. Which is good, because Enjolras may be obtuse — and totally misunderstanding when it comes to the dire need for caffeine _even if the shitty little town you’re in doesn’t have an organic, independently owned fair trade coffee shop_ — but she is an obtuse masochist who Courfeyrac would take on armies for.

Courfeyrac has every intention of going home to Maria and sleeping the day away, but when she drops Enjolras off there is a _Combeferre_ to be seen, and, once Courfeyrac has collapsed across Combeferre’s lap on the couch, moving seems a wholly counterintuitive task. Combeferre’s lap is very comfortable, and she does not complain when you sprawl across it at an uncomfortable angle. Combeferre is a saint, and superior to any and all inanimate pillows. Courfeyrac says as much, as Enjolras goes to meticulously add all her used clothes to the laundry basket and unpack her bag promptly and efficiently without delay — who _does_ that? — and Combeferre strokes her hair indulgently. Courfeyrac can’t see it, because her eyes are closed in rapture at the sweet, soft warmth of Combeferre’s thighs and the bliss of not having to drive just then, but she knows Combeferre is smiling, just a little.

“Edmonton is fun,” Courfeyrac remarks into the dark blue fabric of Combeferre’s jeans. “We should go to Edmonton. Come with me to Edmonton. You drive.”

“I don’t know.” And yes, Combeferre is definitely smiling now, a little wider, Courfeyrac can hear it in her words. “I’m not sure the real thing could compare to your texts.”

Courfeyrac frowns slightly, turning her head to face Combeferre, pouting up at her friend from the warmth of her lap. There had, she knows, been an epic series of texts on The Night of Grantaire, which had included an instigating text from Courfeyrac of “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” after Enjolras had revealed where she’d gone. (Courf had never really worried Enjolras had been abducted by a stranger in the night; when Courf had noticed she was gone, she’d assumed Enjolras had gone off to shank a drunk tar sands worker, or possibly start a fight with a bike cop.) She also knew the night had ended with Enjolras mumbling into Courfeyrac’s lap about how stupid Grantaire was and how Montparnasse was a prime example of the needless reliance on premium cosmetics and restrictive, uncomfortable clothing for women. As a rule, on nights like that, Combeferre ended up with a lot of texts and more than a few blackmail pictures, no matter who was mumbling into whose lap. But Courfeyrac did not typically reread her sent texts after a night out. They were products of the moment! Irrevocable, fleeting artifacts of chaos and anarchy and glory. They didn’t bear thinking on, unless someone made you. “What did I do?” she mumbles, knowing she doesn’t need to beg absolution from Combeferre, that it’s already been given. (If there’s one thing Combeferre might be too much of, it’s too good, too quick to forgive, too understanding; it is entirely possible she’s an obtuse masochist, too, in her endlessly wise, unbelievably sharp way.) 

Wordlessly, Combeferre takes out her phone, a few swipes of her thumb across the screen producing a photo when she holds it for Courfeyrac to see. Enjolras is, in the photo, leaning over the bar, speaking in visible anger to a bartender who looks as though he couldn’t care less she was there, hair hanging in her face and eyes ablaze. That was a nice moment, Courfeyrac thought. Enjolras had been very upset about a shot poured for their coworker that had not been as full as the other shots. She had gone on a touching tirade about inflation in bars and how it promoted a culture of impulsive overspending among blue collar workers who were worn to the bone during the work week and blew all their material benefits on the weekends, on the tyranny of alcohol producers and how it was unbelievable that the rampant abuse and deception of the consumer was even present in the substances consumers used to escape the harsh reality of an oppressive and corrupt capitalist cesspool. Courfeyrac had thought it was quite sweet, given Enjolras’s usual opinion on any of them spending exorbitant (read: any) amounts of money on booze. The photo is accompanied by an enthusiastic caption from Courf: **FREEDOMMMMm!!!!! FREEEEE BOOOOOOOOOZE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!** Courf studies it for a moment before letting her head fall back onto Combeferre’s lap, smiling with satisfaction. “I stand by my words.”

There’s the briefest exhalation of amusement from Combeferre as she sets her phone down again, stroking Courf’s hair once more. “Why are our friends so dumb,” she murmurs, back aching, her lack of sleep overwhelming her now that she’s horizontal, now that the promise of rest is so real to her body.

“They’re not,” Combeferre says softly. “Let them make their own mistakes.” And, Courf supposes, that’s the best she can do, at least so long as Combeferre’s lap is this comfortable.

* * *

It has been just over a month since Maria saw him, and now, thanks to a text message from Courfeyrac — **IS THIS YR MAN??? CHECK LINK xxxxxxxx** — she is staring at his Facebook, and has no idea what to do. His profile isn’t publicly visible, little more than a name and a photo in sepia, all autumn leaves, the striking blue of the eyes she remembers so well muted by the colouring but no less beautiful for it, and Maria cannot, for the life of her, send him a message.

His name is Cyril Fauchelevent. He is a friend of Courfeyrac’s DJ friend, a French major at the university with an English minor, **SINGLE!!!!** according to Courfeyrac, and now that they aren’t meeting eyes across a crowded bar, the idea of contacting him seems beyond foolish. There is absolutely no way that someone that beautiful would have any interest in Maria. She’s not good at conversations, or flirting, or any of it. She’s not nearly pretty enough for someone who looks like him, and for all she knows, she wouldn’t even like him if she met him. (But no, that’s inconceivable. She _saw something_ in him, that night. If there’s any part of them that’s doomed, it’s all her. Someone like him is too perfect for someone like her, awkward and clueless.)

She has been staring at his profile on and off ever since she got the text from Courfeyrac, who is back from Edmonton but still at Combeferre and Enjolras’s, and she does not know what to do. She should close the tab. She should do anything but keep staring hopelessly at his eyes wide and so soulful in that photo. But she _can’t_.

Maria has been on three dates, all of them blind, and all of them double dates with one of Courfeyrac’s love interests of the month. It is a testament to Courfeyrac’s powers of persuasion that she convinced Maria to go through the awkwardness, discomfort, and humiliation more than once. Mind, Courfeyrac is an excellent friend, and she never meant for Maria to not enjoy the dates. The fact remained, however, that no matter how nice the boy — or man, she supposes — things just didn’t work. “It is that ineffable beast, chemistry,” Courfeyrac had said, after the final date had ended with Maria abruptly slapping her date when he made an off-colour comment about foursomes, and promptly flushing and apologizing for the act. “Your nose is very picky about pheromones. And it should be! You are a treasure, Maria. A prize.” She’d kissed Maria’s cheek then, firmly, leaving a bright pink mark behind in the shape of her lips. “Also, men are assholes. Not all of them, but definitely those two. I’m glad you slapped him.”

Maria was not glad she’d slapped him. It was not her proudest moment. (Enjolras, upon hearing the tale from Courfeyrac at the next meeting, had seemed fiercely proud of Maria’s actions, but Enjolras and Maria frequently disagree.) She doesn’t know why she’s so _bad_ at dating; things just never seem to work out. There was never that _spark_ , no matter how much she wanted it to be there.

And now, she’s mooning over someone she’s never even spoken to on Facebook.

Part of her is tempted to wait for Courfeyrac to come back and ask her opinion, but she knows Courf hasn’t slept yet and that she’s had a hard week at work. She doesn’t want to impose on her best friend any more than she already does. Besides, she already knows what Courfeyrac would say: do it. Message him. Friend him. Flash him. Subtlety has never been Courfeyrac’s strong suit, any more than shyness, and while Maria trusts no one above Courf, she also knows that Courf has a predilection for getting her friends into messes that make great stories and terrible experiences.

So, instead, she aimlessly switches through the iTunes playlist that she absolutely has not made for this boy she’s never even spoken to, and she sighs, and she stares at his picture.

* * *

Normally, the term for Cyril’s parental relations would be ‘momma’s boy.’ It’s true that he is his parent’s darling, that he adheres to strict rules and curfews for his parent despite being of age, and that there is just about nothing he wouldn’t do for his parent.

The main difference is that the parent to whom Cyril belongs so wholly is his father. There really aren’t that many negative connotations to being a daddy’s boy, but most fathers don’t seem as concerned for their sons’ chastity and spiritual purity as Cyril’s father is. He doesn’t really mind, but he _does_ recognize that his dynamic with his father is unusual. It pleases him, more than a little, that they flout gender norms. (In their household, becoming a man is measured in selfless acts and moral reflection far more than hockey or musculature or the dogged pursuit of women.)

Cyril has never had too much of a problem with authority figures, despite an abiding suspicion of the police (his father’s influence), and the occasional fit of frustration with the endless rules Jean Valjean has laid out for him. He’d thought, for a while in high school, that university would be his way out from under his father’s wing, but when the time had come, he couldn’t bear to leave Calgary. They have made a home here, volunteering at the Mustard Seed and the Drop-In Centre and the Meow Foundation — the Salvation Army, too, until Cyril had presented his father with a list of the charity’s abuses of the LGBTQIAP community and demanded they devote their time elsewhere — and he knew that while his father might well let him move to a new city to go to school, it would break his heart for them to be apart.

All told, his desire to experience Proper Adult Freedom isn’t worth his father’s broken heart. Valjean has never told Cyril the full story, but he can see how hard his father’s worked to give him a good life, from the crow’s feet etched deep around his eyes to the never-quite-absent sadness in his smile. His father is a good man, and if he’d prefer Cyril stay with him, Cyril can hardly fault him for that. It’s the least he can do to repay Valjean.

So, to the U of C he went, and in the home they’ve occupied for the past several years he’s stayed. They live quietly by Fish Creek Park, rarely speak to the neighbours, and by and large, Cyril is fine with the company of his father, even if he’s gone out with his university friends several times since starting, enjoys being around people his own age as a change of pace.

Cyril has almost never broken curfew. But, a month ago, he had.

Cyril isn’t one to get moony over girls. He’s not sex-crazed, like many of the boys he goes to school with — he may be 19, but he’s just as happy to take good conversation with a girl and his hand in private as he would be to try throwing himself at any girl who would have him — and truth be told, not that many girls impress him. Not that many _people_ impress Cyril; he is choosy about who he’ll give his affection to, a side effect of having been homeschooled and never depending too much on the validation of his peers, and while he’s at school, he’d rather focus on _school_ than trying to lose his virginity. Cyril is fine with being a virgin. He is absolutely okay with it. So far as he understands, first times with boys typically involve the boy embarrassing himself and disappointing the girl so, really, there’s not too much of a rush on that experience.

But the girl he’d seen at the club. There was _something about her_ , and it’s left him horribly out of it, unable to focus, permanently distracted. Cyril is unused to the feeling, and is not particularly enjoying it (might enjoy it more, if only he knew how to find the source of the frustration, to _act_ ). He’s a bit disappointed in himself, because he always thought that if there was a girl who’d turn him into a moping mess, it would be because of the sharpness of her wit or some talent or innate goodness, not just a pair of wide brown eyes staring at him from across a club. He thinks that, very possibly, his hormones have finally overtaken him. It is a day for mourning. He is, finally, a gormless teenaged boy just like he’s supposed to be, and no amount of volunteer hours or time spent alone with a book is making his mental fog go away. No matter what he does, he _can’t get her out of his mind_ , and it’s driving him slightly mad.

His father has noticed, of course, and while he accepted Cyril’s excuse of “I just have a bit of a headache” earlier in the week, Cyril knows he isn’t fooled. Still, Cyril doesn’t want to admit that he’s spent the past few weeks out of his mind because of a girl he hasn’t even spoken to; it seems shallow and stupid, to have a glimpse of a face filling up his mind when he doesn’t even know the person the face belongs to. For all he knows, she could be appalling.

He doesn’t think she is, though. He thinks, privately, that she would be very kind, careful with her hands, soft-spoken and clever. He hopes she would be challenging. He hopes she never knows the sorts of things he’s thought about her in the past 30 or so days, because they really aren’t the sort of thing you should think about a girl you haven’t even spoken to.

The thought of asking one of his friends who she was has not occurred to him in any seriousness, because Cyril, accustomed to keeping his thoughts to himself after years of secrets with his father, is not in the habit of sharing much. Besides, Commonwealth isn’t the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else, and the club had been packed. The chances of anyone knowing who the girl with the big brown eyes and the round cheeks and long dark hair are slim, particularly considering a lot of girls have big brown eyes and round cheeks and long dark hair. Still, he can’t get the look they’d shared out of his mind.

Hormones. Pathetic.

When he goes to the Meow Foundation, it’s with the hope that a few solid hours spent around kittens and cats will distract him. The Meow Foundation is a no-kill facility, an essential factor for Cyril, who had tried volunteering at the Humane Society but found the countless animals they had to put down too heartwrenching — and, when he’d talked his father into adopting three cats, two dogs, and a ferret to save them from being put down, too expensive. He barely notices the newcomers standing with Joanne, one of his supervisors, until he’s nearly run into them.

Joanne smiles, a hand flitting to his arm as she gestures at the pair, an Asian girl with close-cropped hair and a Latina girl who looks like she could take Cyril down if she had half a mind to. It takes Cyril a moment to place the second girl, and when he does, his mouth falls open against his will — “You,” he says, before Joanne can introduce them.

“Me?” The girl raises an eyebrow, the shoulders above her crossed arms squaring, and her friend casts a worried look between them as Joanne shoots him a perplexed look.

The girl is one of Courfeyrac’s friends, Cyril remembers. Courfeyrac, who was friends with Paul. Courfeyrac, who had been there that night at the Commonwealth.

It seems like too much of a coincidence to be innocuous. Cyril can’t help but glance around, in search for a pair of wide brown eyes, before meeting the girl’s eyes again. “Sorry, I’m — Hi, I’m Cyril.” He holds out his hand, which the girl shakes, carefully. Her grip is very firm. “We met at Commonwealth, when my friend was DJing? Paul? You’re friends with Courfeyrac, right?”

It takes a moment before the girl’s face splits into a smile, displaying one chipped tooth. “ _Cyril_!” She shakes his hand harder, taking it in both of hers for emphasis. “Sorry, man. That was a wild night, and I’m not good with faces. Bossuet, this is Cyril, he has the misfortune of sharing an acquaintance with Courf. Cyril, this is Bossuet, and if she doesn’t end up with rabies by the end of the day something’s gone horribly wrong. We’re here to pet cats and do good.”

Cyril can’t help but smile as Bossuet and Joanne relax next to her. “That’s the basic idea,” he admits. “Joanne, did you want me to show them around?”

Joanne smiles, squeezing Cyril’s arm. “That would be fantastic. We’ve got a couple of calls to deal with and I need to see if we can find room to make for them. Girls, this is Cyril, one of our longest running volunteers. You’re in good hands.”

Cyril shows them around the facilities, introducing them to the current batch of cats — and narrowly preventing Bossuet from accidentally knocking open a large container of cat food — before, with a vague sense of looming doom, talking to Bahorel about decidedly unfeline matters.

“Did you have a good time at Paul’s set?” he asks, politely ignoring the way Bahorel’s fawning over a small tabby cat.

“Polyester? Oh yeah,” Bahorel says offhandedly, using her fingers as impromptu toys for the cat. (Totally against protocol and a terrible idea, but Cyril can’t quite bring himself to stop her, so delighted does the cat look as it gnaws on Bahorel’s already scarred index finger.) “One of our friends got a little wasted and it threw everyone off, but good set, all in all. He’s a bit of an ass though, isn’t he?”

“Excuse me?” Cyril frowns. He might not be as close with his friends as some people are, but that doesn’t mean he’ll stand by and let them be insulted. Bahorel, however, appears unruffled, barely glancing up at him before carrying on.

“The DJ. I mean, it was a good set, but he kept winking at all the girls in there as much as Courfeyrac would’ve. And Courfeyrac likes winking way too fucking much. She can’t even wink. It’s a fucking mess.”

“She contorts her entire face,” Bossuet chimes in, from where she is valiantly trying to brush out the mats from a prim white longhair cat. “Kind of like this.” A moment later, one eye is squeezed shut, the other a narrow slit as Bossuet scrunches up the right side of her face, and Cyril can’t help but laugh.

“He likes the perks of being a DJ,” he offers. “It’s not like he can do it for the pay alone.”

“Indie boys don’t deserve it,” Bahorel says, smirking at Cyril. Bossuet adds:

“Coppin’ a feel now you got a record deal!”

A moment later, Bossuet has dropped the brush, and the longhair nearly gets away as she bends down to retrieve it, Cyril’s quick movement the only barrier between Bossuet and one half-brushed feline hellbent on freedom. By the time they all settle down again, Bahorel has her cat wrapped around her wrist, and if Cyril didn’t have better survival instincts, he might be tempted to smile at the way Bahorel cooes at it.

“What do you do, Cyril?” Bossuet asks, back to gently brushing out the tangles from the longhair’s fur with a gentle grace at odds with the bouts of clumsiness that have already become obvious since she arrived. “I mean, aside from cuddling kitties.”

Cyril smiles slightly, looking down at his hands by reflex even as he checks the ear of a kitten who Joanne thinks may have been running a temperature earlier. “This and that,” he says. “My father and I do a lot of volunteering at the local homeless shelters, along with going wherever seems to need us the most on a given day. We’ve done a lot with the floods, obviously, lately.” Bossuet and Bahorel make noises of grim assent, faces sobering even as they tend to the felines before them. “I go to school, too, at the U of C. What about you two?”

“I’m collecting student loans and moonlighting as a History major to cover up my vigilante work,” Bahorel says cheerily.

“She’s not moonlighting very well,” and Bossuet’s tone is light, too, though the look she shoots Bahorel is just this side of chiding. “She never goes to class.”

Cyril grins, setting the kitten — fever-free — back into its place with a scratch behind the ears. “What about you?”

“I never went to school,” Bossuet admits. “I caught pneumonia in grade 12 and my diplomas showed it. But I worked in construction for a while. Now I paint houses and play guitar in a band. Bahorel’s in it with me. She plays bass. If you go to the U of C, though, you should check out Les Amies.”

Cyril raises an eyebrow, distracted from the mention of a band — Cyril loves music, all types, and he loves the people who make it even more — by the recommendation. “Les Amies?” he repeats.

“It’s a group we go to. Student club. Pretty open with their membership, obviously,” Bahorel says, sharing a smirk with Bossuet. “Social justice and all that shit. We fight bigotry and yell at assholes. It’s fun.”

“It can get kind of intense,” Bossuet admits, offering Cyril a smile. “But if you volunteer a lot, it might be up your alley. Just don’t be afraid of Enjolras. She’s very opinionated, but she’s a good friend, once you get past the angelic vengeance.”

“Plus, she’s really funny if you can get her drunk,” Bahorel chimes in. “We only did it once, but it was worth it.”

“ _So_ worth it.”

Cyril hides a smile, returning his attention to the cats. Both Bahorel and Bossuet seem too sharp for him to want to embarrass himself asking about some girl — they’ve been fun to talk to, and he thinks he’d rather be friends with them than make things weird trying to find _her_ — but he can’t help but feel like he’s found a pair of worthy distractions this afternoon, much as he thought it couldn’t happen.

* * *

Grantaire had meant to be entirely ambivalent about her return to Calgary and, within a matter of days, her return to Les Amies meetings. She had meant to take her run-in with Enjolras for what it almost certainly was: the latest in a series of proofs that Enjolras was unpredictable, inescapable, impossible to understand and totally exasperating. Really, she had. It hadn’t been her fault that, whenever Montparnasse hadn’t been fucking Grantaire with her eyes or her mouth, it was harder and harder to concentrate on how _not Enjolras_ she was. While Montparnasse had walked her through shops eyeing thigh high boots and jewelry — thigh high boots and jewelry which, truly, Montparnasse would look better in than nearly anyone else could — Grantaire had carried on a spirited discussion in her head with Enjolras regarding consumerism and its interaction with the patriarchy, ruthlessly dealing out digs at Enjolras’s high-minded idealism which would have had the blonde either rolling her eyes or tearing into Grantaire, depending on the day. It’s no fault of Montparnasse’s; this is all Grantaire and her invariably unhealthy fixations, her inability to take a good thing anything but for granted when it falls into her lap.

So, by the time the others settle into their usual seats — Grantaire is never on time for anything, let alone early, but she frequently wanders into Amies meetings early, a fortuitous combination of proximity to the venue and an unwillingness to let a second of covertly watching Enjolras time slip by outside of her grasp — she is already quite drunk, her flask mercifully ignored by Emile, on shift. The Roasterie does not have a liquor license, but Grantaire is more than practiced enough to know how to keep her public drinking subtle, spiced whiskey tipped generously into her mocha.

All of the Amies have been shaken by the floods, still on the news daily in Calgary (and Enjolras _never shuts up_ about the disproportionately low coverage the Siksika nation has received, and it makes Grantaire want to thwack her across that beautiful nose with a rolled up newspaper, preferably the Sun), and many of them are visibly worn down as they filter into the Roasterie, pushing together tables to assemble for the evening. No one looks more ragged than Feuilly, who always looks more tired than any of them. Grantaire suppresses a laugh at the sight of Bossuet dragging in her guitar, three out of six strings snapped and fingers carefully bandaged, no doubt by Joly, who is tsking over Bossuet’s hand as they enter, taking two seats at Grantaire’s table. Enjolras does not arrive last, but it’s only when the last of them file in that she acknowledges the world beyond Courfeyrac and Combeferre, looking up and pressing a thin, determined smile at all of them, eyes flitting over the group. Grantaire takes a grim pull of her mocha, fighting down a furrowed brow and wave of resentment; she knows that look. That look is the ‘I Have a Plan’ look.

That look never ends well. It might, somewhere else, but so long as Enjolras is in Calgary, she’s planning in the wrong place.

“Thank you, everyone, for coming.” It would be easier, Grantaire thinks, if Enjolras were an outright bitch. The fact that Grantaire _knows_ she loves her friends as much as she loves her causes — though she won’t let herself hold them up as more _important_ than them, is too selfless for that despite her idealistic fucking ego — makes it that much worse. It’s too easy to imagine being loved like that. It’s too easy imagining she already _is_ , given Enjolras’s repeated neglect to ban her outright from meetings. “I know everyone’s had a rough few weeks. I appreciate all of you making time to come by.

“As all of you know, we are due for a municipal election soon.” Grantaire snorts, taking another long drink of her spiked mocha, and ignores the brief flash of Enjolras’s eyes in her direction. (Ignores the memory, unbidden, of Enjolras’s hair loose around her face as she tried to dance to the rhythm Courfeyrac’s hips set.) “While most of the city may be content to assume Nenshi will win a second term and let the election pass by, we cannot afford to ignore this moment of increased media coverage for local affairs. While the news ignores the more colourful politics south of the border to pay passing tribute to the city they’re supposed to be serving, we need to _take advantage_ of what civic spirit the election will rally, and use it as a catalyst for change.” Enjolras smiles again, more warmly, eyes settling on several of them in turn (barely passing over Grantaire, who is making a dedicated study of the paint above the washroom door). “We don’t get this sort of interest in local affairs that often. It would be foolish of us not to take advantage of the opportunity.

“As you know, we’ve had a considerable amount of difficulty rallying the public to the pressing matter of the tar sands.” And this cannot be happening, because Enjolras _cannot_ be this bullheaded, because Grantaire has explained time and time again why anti-oil sands activism won’t work in Calgary, has even gotten actual believers of Les Amies to admit that in a city run by oil and gas, going all Greenpeace on the public’s asses will never work. But of course it’s happening, because of course Enjolras is this bullheaded; it’s one of the reasons Grantaire adores her. “Between the heavy news coverage of the flooding this summer — and I think we can all agree that unprecedented flooding of this magnitude can’t be written off to _natural weather cycles_ alone — and because the mayor and aldermen will be closely monitored on the basis of their reactions to the floods, taking advantage of this catastrophe to draw attention to the _underlying causes_ is the only sensible thing to do.” Enjolras pauses, looking genuinely regretful, and Grantaire can’t help but love her all the more for it, even if she sort of wants to punch her in her perfect face, as she takes another drink. “I know that some of us here have been gravely affected by the floods. Too many in our province have. And I don’t wish to be insensitive, but I’d rather something _good_ come of it than we stay away from a sensitive topic, and spare delicate sensibilities in favour of _accomplishing_ something.”

It isn’t long after that before Combeferre begins laying out the logistics, and Courfeyrac starts talking about how to engage the public, and all through the spiels Grantaire drinks her mocha, going up wordlessly to Emile for a refill, tipping the rest of her flask into the cup before Emile even pours the syrup in. They communicate through raised eyebrows and lowered eyelids — Emile knows just as well as Grantaire does that Enjolras’s attempts to convince a city that owes the entirety of its prosperity to oil and gas that the environment and human dignity must come before profit are hopeless, though Grantaire suspects Emile’s a little more hopeful than she is — before Grantaire returns to her seat, ignoring Joly’s look of concern as she glares holes through Enjolras’s earnest expression while Courfeyrac runs through suggestions, from cookies iced with the logos of oil sands-drilling companies crossed out with thick red lines through petitions through rallies on campus. It’s only when Enjolras starts discussing the possibility of utilizing her company’s street team’s favourite downtown corners to gain signatures for a petition that Grantaire can’t suppress her cynicism any longer, eyes moving from the dregs of her second nearly drained mocha to Enjolras’s face, readying for the fight.

“What exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish here?” Grantaire can feel the table tense around her — and she should watch her words more than usual, really, because she’s bailed out Feuilly’s basement and seen the marooned cars by Jehan’s, knows this hurt is more immediate for her friends than it normally is, but caution has never been Grantaire’s strong suit — and presses on, eyes locked on Enjolras’s. The blonde’s cheeks are already pink, her eyes ablaze, and Grantaire can’t help but hope Enjolras comes here looking for fights, too, looking for _something_ worthy of the chasm and longing between them (all of the longing, of course, Grantaire’s). “You’re going to get some signatures on a petition. Great. You’ll get a few people to admit they’re upset about the damage done to the environment. Cool. You’ll maybe even get a few of them to say they wish our indigenous population was treated better, distract them from drunk Indian jokes for the day — sorry, Feuilly. What do you actually think you’ll accomplish? Because if they’re faced with a bunch of fresh-faced young idealists, they’ll humour you, because they want to be worthy of worthy ideals, and they’re not looking for a fight. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty — boycotting oil, or quitting their corporate jobs, or voting with their consciences when it’s an election that matters instead of Nenshi’s triumphant parade — they’re going to go back to whatever they were doing before, because they’re looking to take care of their own precious asses first and foremost, and by 2015 you’ll be a distant memory. _What do you think you’re going to get out of this?_ ”

Enjolras always looks beautiful like this, all flushed cheeks and fury at Grantaire’s faithlessness. Her eyes are fixed on Grantaire and nothing else, her attention utterly distracted from her precise (wasted, useless) plans, and Grantaire can’t help but take a thrill from it, even as she feels her chest shrivelling into itself under the red hot weight of Enjolras’s glare. “This isn’t about _gain_ , Grantaire. It’s about doing what’s _right._ ”

“And this is right?” Grantaire can’t suppress the bitter laugh that bubbles out of her chest, harsh against the wet flesh of her throat. “Getting your friends to waste their time on some glorified information campaign? Here’s the breakdown: Nenshi’s going to win, hardly anyone’s going to vote to make it happen, and everyone’s going to keep working at BP and Chevron and Shell because _those are the jobs that are here_. Not everyone has a nice suburban mommy and daddy to subsidize their life, Enjolras. I would have thought you’d learnt that by now.”

Enjolras’s cheeks are even redder, now, and Grantaire can see Courfeyrac and Combeferre’s shoulders both tense under the friendly fire, both trying to work out how to defuse the situation without setting Enjolras off even more; being told to back down from a fight has always set the blonde off, even when she knows it’s the right thing to do. But, of course, in this case it _wouldn’t_ be the right thing to do, because here Grantaire is, sowing the seeds of discord and hopelessness among the fertile promise of Les Amies’s hopes and dreams, again, and Enjolras would be a fool for not taking advantage of what little civic pride Calgary has to spit up for a municipal election, and they both know it. “I am well aware of my advantages,” Enjolras says, and her voice is all mid-winter ice now, the kind that has a harsh, acrid scent to it, that burns up your nostrils and freezes the mucous into the hairs as soon as you step out the door. “I would have thought _you’d_ learnt that by now. That doesn’t change the fact that an election is a key opportunity for us to get our message out, and _regardless of the receptivity of the public_ , it is our _responsibility_ as engaged citizens to do our best with the opportunities we have. We have the resources and experience to take action, and it would be beyond selfish of us not to do so. We need to make _use_ of our advantages, Grantaire. Not cower in the corner because of them.”

“ _Experience_?” This time the laugh comes more easily, though it’s no less bitter, and Grantaire wishes desperately she had more left in her flask, or that smoking in the Roasterie was kosher, something to distract herself with, a series of movements to give her reasonable pause before she keeps digging her grave. “A bunch of students with well-used Change.org accounts? Tell me, Enjolras. How have the oil sands affected your water supply? How flammable is your tap water? Have you been pushed off your land by an oil corporation? How many times have you ended up bloodied by riot police? Just because you’ve voted and gone to shitty Occupy protests and run for student council, doesn’t make you _experienced_. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, and you’d better hope your enemies don’t notice you, because they are infinitely better funded, more ruthless, and more _experienced_ than you’ll ever be. You’re a bleeding heart liberal raging against the dying of the light, and your fight’s just as futile. You’ll keep making angry Tumblr posts for a few more years, until you have to buckle down and study for the LSAT, and from there on out it’ll be all scholarships and exams and internships. You’ve got 4, maybe 5 years before your main concern is interviewing techniques and how to get in at an up-and-coming firm. Maybe by the time you finish law school you’ll still have your parents’ cheques to tide you over. Maybe you’ll still go into human rights law. But sooner or later you’re going to realize that defending the public and pro bono work is just as helpless and fucked up and corrupt as corporate law, and you’re going to take better and better paying jobs in the hopes of funding the cause, until one day you’re in a corner office with a six figure salary, no spare time, and a fancy hybrid car that you tell yourself was a good purchase because it’s good for the environment, even though you’d always meant to stick with public transit. Some bleeding heart’s going to knock on your door just like you do now and when they tell you about 2028’s Syria, you’ll give them the same excuses you deal with now, because no one can shine this bright for that long without burning right out, and you’re too much a survivor to let yourself get overridden by the selfishness and apathy that runs the world — you’ll start out trying to tear it down from the inside, and before you know it, you’ll _be_ the inside, and you won’t have the distance to even notice it happened.” By the time Grantaire is done speaking, she can feel her pulse and the tension threaded through her body, a slight sting in her eyes, the anxiety of the caffeine overriding the sluggish complicity of the alcohol, and she feels a wave of sickness above that — she’s fine needling Enjolras, but it’s unusual for her to go on such a _personal_ rant. She blames the memory of Enjolras uncharacteristically nervous under Edmonton streetlights, sneaking glances of her in front of the buskers. It doesn’t make the sight of Enjolras’s stony expression now any easier to bear.

“Get out,” Enjolras says finally, a moment before Courfeyrac’s lips pursed pre-action can put forth any words. If she sees the worried, pained looks of her friends between them, she ignores them. She has eyes only for Grantaire, and even with the sting of Enjolras’s words, the crushing sense of fatality, Grantaire can’t help but get a thrill from it.

“Why should I?” Grantaire’s voice is surprisingly steady, all considered, and she barely notices the minute graze of Joly’s fingertips on her forearm, doesn’t register her own rejection of the comfort, jerking away from the touch. “I’m the one who works here. Not my fault a bunch of uppity activists invaded.”

“ _Everyone here except you_ is dedicated to making some kind of change, Grantaire.” And there it is, her name, and Grantaire can’t help but relish the merciless enunciation of the syllables that encapsulate her. “ _We_ aren’t the ones who don’t belong here. Perhaps if you got your mind out of the bottle for a day or two —”

“Get out.”

This time, the words come from behind the bar, and Emile — who rarely makes full use of his shoulder span and heavy brow around the Amies, but is giving Enjolras a formidable enough glare to silence her, for the moment — has abandoned all pretence of busywork behind the counter, eyes fixed on Enjolras. It’s unusual for Emile to look angry — he’s perfected the art of apparent disinterest coated with a sheen of snark — but there are a few people for whom he’ll break out all the repressed rage and threat of his upbringing, and right now Enjolras is under the weight of his gaze, so much better versed in the worst of humanity than her precise glare. Grantaire can see Enjolras shrink slightly under it, and can’t help but hate herself for how she’s torn between overwhelming gratitude towards Emile and a powerful urge to go punch him in the face, for daring to make Enjolras look that cowed.

“No,” she says, before Enjolras can reply, standing, stuffing her wallet back down into her pocket. “I’ll go. God forbid these darling flowers should have to wilt beneath the blazing sun that sears away all evidence of the floods, save the mould and the rot and the wreckage.” Grantaire sketches a bow to the Amies that is surprisingly elaborate, given the drink and the slight shaking of her hands, and backs away from her table, only knocking the chair a little. She doesn’t meet Enjolras’s eyes. “I’ll leave you to the salvation of this world, unworthy as it is of your attention.” She pushes open the door a moment later, taking a deep breath of the dry summer heat, already heading for the Liquor Depot two blocks away, and barely registers Joly opening the door after her, following with hands convulsively stuffed in pockets. Joly is a good friend. He should be back at the meeting, wringing his hands over logistics, but Grantaire can’t help but be grateful for the fact that _someone_ followed him out, much as she fails to merit the loyalty. They walk in silence to the liquor store, Grantaire making straight for the whiskey, all too aware that if she mixes poisons on top of the unsettled, crashing feeling in her gut, she’ll surely be sick by sundown. Joly — bless him — picks up a 12 pack of beer, and follows her all the way back to her apartment, graciously silent.

When Emile gets home from his shift, some hours later, Coda and Bossuet have joined them, and the threesome is being mercifully uncoupley, slung around Grantaire’s livingroom looking for all the world like people who don’t have amazing group sex on a regular basis. This is one of the reasons why it hurts so much to be so obviously unworthy in the presence of Les Amies; Grantaire can’t even hate Enjolras, she’s so far above Grantaire, but Enjolras’s _friends_ are golden, the best of the best, endlessly tolerant of Grantaire’s ups and downs and fits of passive aggressive (and aggressive aggressive) pique. Grantaire had thought about texting Montparnasse, but she knows they don’t share their vulnerable bits deliberately, and she’d tossed her phone across the livingroom and behind the couch, hoping to avoid temptation.

“I brought rum,” Emile says by way of greeting, holding the bottle up to a general cheer, despite the fact that Grantaire is obviously nearing utter bleakness cross-legged on the floor, that Joly’s concern is evident from his place in the armchair, and that Coda and Bossuet are making a concerted effort not to touch each other from their positions on the couch. When the latter two arrived, they’d brought red wine, and Grantaire had been more than far gone enough not to care about mixing by then; her lips and teeth are stained with the stuff, her tongue the dark purple of a good bruise.

Within 90 seconds, Emile has a rum and coke, the rest of the bottles placed on the coffee table, and he’s sitting kitty corner to Grantaire on the floor in front of the table, an unlikely hulk of muscle and simmering anger amongst the pity (self- and otherwise) focused on Grantaire in the cluttered livingroom. Grantaire is endlessly grateful to Emile for being one of the only other people in their group of friends who sees how hopelessly, irremediably misguided Enjolras is — the other being Feuilly, who’s somehow kept her gentleless through her dozens of jobs and chronic lack of sleep, who still manages to believe despite her firsthand knowledge of what a shithole the world is — and a part of her feels more settled, having another grumpy, self-destructive cynic in the room.

“You guys should make a drinking game for our fights,” she announces abruptly, her finger making the same listless round the lip of her mug of whiskey it’s been tracing for the last twenty minutes.

“Courf and Bahorel already did,” Bossuet volunteers, looking abashed a moment later. Grantaire lets out another bitter laugh and lifts her mug in cheers, downing its contents a moment later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I didn't realize it had been over a month. I am so sorry. I am trying to get used to updating regularly. On the bright side, I edited several chapters today, and am making writing the scenes my first draft of the fic is still missing. I am going to endeavour to get this finished soon, friends. There will be many updates coming. In the meantime, comments are very welcome, including concrit, and if you would like to see more of me I am always at [tumblr](http://igpykin.tumblr.com), even if I sometimes take a while to reply to messages because I'm _awful_. I love you all very much.


	5. At least there are cupcakes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thank you for asking, friend. I’ve been dysfunctional, depressed, and drunk, how have you been? Did you give any thought to my scathing critique of your life choices?”
> 
> Grantaire is very deliberately not looking at Enjolras, but that doesn’t stop her from seeing in the periphery of her eyesight how Enjolras’s features are pinching more as she glares holes through Grantaire’s apparently unconcerned face. “No. And you know, if you were drunk less, you’d likely be dysfunctional and depressed less, too.” A pause, in which Grantaire stops polishing the glass, one brow sliding up along with her eyes to regard Enjolras with utter disbelief, and then the blonde adds, “Alcohol is a depressant.”
> 
> “Really.” Grantaire does not move. Her hand is inside of the glass, wrapped in the rag. Her eyebrow stays up. Her eyes stay stuck on Enjolras’s. She can feel the smirk threatening to slide across her face. “Tell me more, doctor.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has explicit discussion of depression and addiction to smoking and drinking, so if you think either of these will be triggering for you, please tread carefully. Also, this chapter is dedicated to [arbitraryink](http://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitraryink), who has finished her semester! Keep your eyes out for a Feuilly-centric oneshot in this verse, also dedicated to this achievement.

When Grantaire shows up to the next meeting it’s because she’s at work, Emile refusing to trade shifts and none of the other baristas able to. Joly is steadfastly attempting to maintain his calm despite the group of exceptionally drunk teenagers who can barely hold back their laughter long enough to place their orders, spittle flying, caked with dirt and grease by choice. A squirrel confronted with a pack of angry dogs could do a better job than he’s doing, all rigidity and wide eyes that very deliberately do not slide over to the group, Bossuet’s hand placed on his thigh. Joly’s knuckles are not quite white around her hand, but Grantaire suspects that if it weren’t for his deep-seated concern about contributing to Bossuet’s freakish ability to obtain fractures and breaks with the same regularity Courfeyrac obtains dates, they would be. (Joly has never been fond of large groups of drunk people, though considering the sorts of things large groups of drunk people have habits of doing, Grantaire can’t exactly blame him.)

It is just her luck, she thinks, that a bunch of permafried teenagers — echoes of her own high school years, right down to the dirty jean vests and smudged eyeliner — would choose _tonight_ to show up, a vivid display for Enjolras to disdain. The blonde in question, waiting for Bahorel and Feuilly to arrive, is meticulously sorting through her notes, eyes flicking occasionally to the group of kids when they emit a particularly loud burst of laughter, flitting over Grantaire just as furtively, like she’s trying not to stare at something indecent. Normally, Grantaire likes drunk people. They are _her_ people. They might be unruly, uncouth, and somewhat violent, but at the very least, Grantaire can understand them. (Plus, plenty of them are willing to share, and Grantaire’s never been rich enough or strong enough to say no to a free drink.) But tonight, only a week after going off at Enjolras, and still hungover from the night before, the imagery is too heavy-handed to bear. It is times like these that convince Grantaire that there is a god or a pantheon, and that it or they are not very fond of her. Normally, she’d be joking around with the kids, but instead her lips press together and she waits for one of them to get their shit together enough to place a coherent order. She’ll fuck it up to let off steam; it’s not like the kids are in any place to register the accuracy of their coffee.

The meeting starts, despite the teens’ raucous laughter, and Grantaire does her best to ignore both, focusing on the orders — letting the espresso burn just a little. She is here as an employee, not a disciple.

(That doesn’t make it any easier to ignore the way Enjolras’s hair frames her face in loose waves, how it escapes, as always, the bun she tried to force it into. Grantaire remembers the night Enjolras fell asleep halfway through _Reservoir Dogs_ and Jehan wove braids through her hair with delicate fingers, Enjolras barely stirring as the poet went to work; she pushes down the memory like bile.)

By the time the almost unnoticeable noise comes — a slight clearing of the throat, barely audible, and who _does that_ to get attention? — the kids are gone, and Grantaire is wiping down every nook and cranny of the espresso machine that’s accessible without taking it apart. The noise happens twice before Grantaire frowns, glancing over her shoulder, and even as she straightens and turns, she drops the rag she was cleaning with, barely saving it from the floor.

“Hi,” Enjolras says, looking at Grantaire like she’s a lunatic which, really, is perfectly valid.

“Hello.” It’s funny, how difficult it can be to exchange the most basic pleasantries with Enjolras. Grantaire can feel the hesitation etched across her face and hates herself for it; she is not supposed to be like this. Enjolras has no time for her when she’s like this. The only time the blonde notices her is when she’s being a cocky aggravation, and even then it’s a balancing act with no net, a suicide walk across a tightrope of indeterminate length and height. “Done proselytizing for the night?”

There’s a flash of annoyance across Enjolras’s face, her fair brows knitting together slightly, and something in Grantaire’s chest relaxes, the moment of vulnerability gone. (Even if she can’t imagine why Enjolras would bother speaking to her after last week, though she supposes she _is_ the only avenue to caffeine in the room, and while Enjolras’s blood caffeine level may not be quite as staggering as Grantaire’s blood alcohol level, it’s a close battle.)

“We’ve adjourned the official meeting,” Enjolras says, clearly trying to be patient — which is so cute, because it _never_ works out for her — the expression on her face screaming of all the crass comments and digs she expects from Grantaire. “Can I have coffee?”

Grantaire nods, shrugging off the request — of course she can have coffee; it’s a coffee shop — and turning to pour the biggest black coffee she can, not needing to ask what Enjolras will have. She knows her order by heart, along with her birthday (January 22, 1993), enneagram type (1: the reformer), and finals candy preference (red liquorice). Enjolras frowns a little at the mug when Grantaire sets it on the counter, but says nothing, taking out her money and setting it down beside the drink. Grantaire does not notice how this prevents skin contact. She does not. If she does, it doesn’t matter to her in the slightest. She takes the coins and gets the change, and absolutely does not take it as anything personal when Enjolras drops all the change in the tip jar, even though it’s a 70% tip. Enjolras probably gives all food industry workers at least 70% tips as a matter of class conscious principle. She probably mugs downtown executives when she sees them undertipping. This would not surprise Grantaire in the slightest.

What does surprise Grantaire is that Enjolras lingers at the counter, fingers tentative around the curve of her mug, eyes flitting down to the counter before they slide up to Grantaire’s, reluctant. Grantaire can feel the anxiety rising in her chest again — and worse, the hope, so much more dangerous than any other sickness — and takes a step back without realizing it, starting to toy with the edges of the cleaning rag, just to give herself something to do.

“How have you been?” Enjolras asks, and Grantaire is just about positive this is the first time in two years that Enjolras has asked her any such thing, and she nearly laughs.

“Why the fuck do you care?” Grantaire prompts, voice pitched low — because she may be chronically self-destructive and in love with bad ideas, but she’s still at work, and doesn’t particularly want to lose her job — leaning forward on the counter to grin at Enjolras, whose eyebrows have shot up, her mouth opening slightly.

“We’re… friends,” Enjolras says carefully, sounding as though she’s testing out the words for herself, not quite sure if they fit (and boy, is Grantaire familiar with that sentiment). “We didn’t part on the best of terms last week. I wanted to see how you were.”

“Did Courfeyrac make sad eyes at you until you came over here?” Grantaire asks dully, and Enjolras’s brow furrows more, the tiny pout that usually precedes her voice starting to rise forming.

“No.”

“Well.” Grantaire picks up a clean glass and polishes it, because if she stays still she will have to focus on Enjolras’s face and keep mapping the minute contortions of her features and _then she will finally lose her mind_. “Thank you for asking, friend. I’ve been dysfunctional, depressed, and drunk, how have you been? Did you give any thought to my scathing critique of your life choices?”

Grantaire is very deliberately not looking at Enjolras, but that doesn’t stop her from seeing in the periphery of her eyesight how Enjolras’s features are pinching more as she glares holes through Grantaire’s apparently unconcerned face. “No. And you know, if you were drunk less, you’d likely be dysfunctional and depressed less, too.” A pause, in which Grantaire stops polishing the glass, one brow sliding up along with her eyes to regard Enjolras with utter disbelief, and then the blonde adds, “Alcohol is a depressant.”

“Really.” Grantaire does not move. Her hand is inside of the glass, wrapped in the rag. Her eyebrow stays up. Her eyes stay stuck on Enjolras’s. She can feel the smirk threatening to slide across her face. “Tell me more, doctor.”

They stay like that for a moment, eyes locked on one another, Grantaire striving for nonchalance and Enjolras trying to glare her into a moment of honesty, before Courfeyrac manifests, as Courfeyrac is wont to do in moments of tension, her arm suddenly around Enjolras’s waist and squeezing, knocking the tension away with all the respect one would give the swatting of a fly. (Grantaire’s eyes do not flicker down to where Courfeyrac’s arm presses into the softness of Enjolras’s waist, and she is not jealous when they do. She isn’t.) “All made up?” she asks in the terrifyingly cheery voice she uses when she is just about ready to start yelling for her very adult friends to go take time-outs in opposite corners, bright red smile turning from Grantaire to Enjolras.

“We are very made up,” Enjolras says, all the potential anger that had been twining her small body dangerously tight a moment ago dissipating, fading into something duller, deadpan. Grantaire’s eyes slide back to the glass and she follows Enjolras’s lead, tone slipping back into dismissive and carefree.

“All clear, chief. Minimal insults exchanged. Pleasantries failed. Status quo returned.”

“ _Good._ ” Courfeyrac squeezes Enjolras again before releasing her, lifting herself up on the counter to lean over it and press a kiss to Grantaire’s cheek. Grantaire thinks she catches a flicker of something in Enjolras’s face as the mass of cleavage, lipstick, and hair retreats to allow the rest of the world back into her line of sight, but a moment later it’s gone, and she pushes it away, along with all other thoughts of Enjolras and the things her stupid perfect face does. “You know it makes us kids anxious when Mommy and Scarier Mommy fight. _Now_ ,” she barrels on, even as Enjolras opens her mouth to object, pulling her away from the counter. “A newbie has a question for you, Enjolras. And if they’re suicidal enough to want to ask you directly, you cannot deny them, fair leader. ‘Aire, we’re going back to mine after the meeting. You come when you’re done.”

Enjolras shoots a look back at Grantaire over her shoulder as Courfeyrac drags her away, and Grantaire shrugs, hiding a smile as she turns back to the espresso machine.

* * *

It has come to Courfeyrac’s attention, in the last few weeks, that she may have an unfortunate, misguided, and entirely inappropriate crush. This is, of course, inexcusable; there are already unfortunate, misguided crushes in their little troupe of friends, and Courfeyrac has designated herself as wingman to both, desperately striving to get Enjolras and Marius to notice their too-often spurned admirers, to no avail. This is, furthermore, bewildering, as Courfeyrac is not particularly prone to crushes. Hardcore lusting, absolutely. Idle appreciation, always. Sincere desire to kiss, definitely. Crushes aren’t really Courfeyrac’s forte, a fact which has led to her breaking rather more hearts than she’d prefer, even though she’s been upfront with the word — aro — ever since she knew it existed. Courfeyrac is excellent at loving, loves her friends and pinup dresses and action movies and white chocolate chips and passionate debate, but her love isn’t the kind that ends up in a wedding dress or a monogamous relationship or pining poetry.

Still, while Enjolras stews over her laptop and Courfeyrac rests her head in Combeferre’s lap, the picture of frustrated despair, it occurs to Courfeyrac that it is entirely possible she has developed a too-potent crush on one of her very best friends in the entirety of the galaxy. This is a problem. This is unfortunate. This is not what she should be focusing on. But Combeferre’s lap is so comfortable, the scent of her all cinnamon and home, and the absent movement of her left hand’s fingers through Courfeyrac’s hair feels too good. She cannot extricate herself. All is lost. All is hopeless.

She’ll worry about that later.

“I vote,” she announces — and Enjolras barely even seems to note the new sound in the room, keeps frowning at her laptop as though she can change everything _wrong_ on it with the mere power of her gaze — “if all else fails, I go streaking through every voting station on election day, covered in oil. Maybe Feuilly can make me fake seagull wings. Everyone understands oily seagulls, right? Better coverage than the tar sands.”

Enjolras glances at her, and Courfeyrac can feel Combeferre’s stomach contract with a barely audible laugh, but otherwise her incisive wit and brilliance goes unnoticed. She is wasted on this livingroom. This is a travesty.

Courfeyrac may be extroverted, unashamed, and sometimes abrasive, but she is also very clever, and painfully attuned to her friends’ emotions. She knows that Enjolras is too tied up in her silent, infuriated obsession over Grantaire’s words tonight to pay much attention to any suggestions. She knows that Combeferre is too busy monitoring their friend’s simmering rage and strategizing on how best to defuse it to relax. Still, it seems wrong not to try. The final third of last week’s meeting had passed in tense, terse economy of language, hyperaware of the weight of Emile’s glare and the absence where Grantaire and Joly’s chairs should have been filled; tonight’s meeting had ended with Enjolras making fumbling grasps at peace and trying to keep her patience with the well-meaning but very green high school student who’d asked her questions about starting up a GSA in her school. Courfeyrac knows her role; she’s every bit as qualified to lead the group as Enjolras and Combeferre, but where her friends are master strategists and workaholics, it’s Courfeyrac’s _emotional intelligence_ that makes her indispensable. When her friends are emotionally constipated, it’s Courfeyrac’s job to get out the plunger and let loose the storm, so to speak. It’s not a _pleasant_ job, not always, but she’s _good_ at it.

Still, past a certain point, trying to ease the dysfunction between Grantaire and Enjolras seems a Sisyphean task, a clog too big for even the sturdiest of plungers to breach. It gets _old_.

And there is the matter of Combeferre’s absent combing through her hair, which is more soothing than it has any right to be, between the basic tactile comfort and the unquestionable sense of security that comes of being next to one of her closest friends. It is very tempting to go to sleep on Combeferre’s lap right then and there, sprawled across their couch. Still, Courfeyrac must resist. Between Enjolras’s emotional blockage and Combeferre’s unerring caution, _someone_ needs to fix this.

The ideal, of course, would be to find the magical words to communicate with all due respect and tenderness, ‘Hello, Enjolras! Have you considered the possibility that the reason you get so upset when Grantaire insults you is because you want to make lots of lesbian babies with her?’ However, as Courfeyrac has been trying that for at least the last year and a half to no avail, the ideal is not to be striven for tonight, not given the rigidity with which Enjolras glares down at her laptop screen. She lets herself revel for a moment longer in the warmth of Combeferre’s lap and the steady path of her friend’s fingertips back and forth over her scalp before, with a weighty sigh, she pushes herself upright, giving Enjolras her best friend smile, the one that says ‘it’s alright, everything is going to be fine, you can do this.’

“So,” she says, “the election. Let’s plan.”

* * *

Being depressed gets old. Not just for the person wallowing in self-loathing — though that’s a treat all its own, because Grantaire hasn’t painted in weeks, can barely convince herself to get out of bed unless she has work or a date with Parnasse or an appointment with friends, and even then it’s not a sure thing if she thinks she can worm her way out of it — but for the people having to _deal_ with them. Grantaire has a strong support network. She knows that, even if she can’t always use it — because Enjolras has been a catalyst for her self-hatred for so long; she has to weigh her options, figure out who she can or can’t safely disclose to, depending on the bad mood of the day — but even the strongest support network will buckle under the strain of a weight like Grantaire, eventually.

Over time, her need to let someone know — “I’m hurting, please listen, please make it better” — becomes just another reason to disdain herself. She knows no one can fix her problems but herself. She knows, too, that she’s unwilling to undertake the work such a task would require. Unloading her problems onto the willing shoulders of her friends is beyond selfish. They will suggest helpful, practical solutions, which she will ignore, and over time they will look progressively more frustrated as time and time again they give helpful advice, and she replies, simply, “I can’t.” It’s unfair to ask nice, sane, hard-working people like Joly or Bossuet or even indomitable Courfeyrac to take on her burdens, when she isn’t even willing to shoulder them herself. She knows it, but she can’t stop herself; there is a sickening relief in knowing she’s making it harder and harder for them to stay friends with her, text by drunk dial by text.

When classes start, she stops bothering them. They have work to do. So does she. She burrows under the covers every morning, nauseous at the prospect of the day ahead. There’s no reason to add to their grief. She’s done that enough.

For most of her life, Grantaire has been able to push aside her problems to save her neck, when things came down to the wire. She’d wallow until there was no time left to wallow, and then she’d get a bottle of whiskey to get her through the night, power through the work, whether that work was school or an actual job or another meeting spent trying not to trace the fine-boned lines of Enjolras’s stupid, perfect, awful face. She isn’t sure whether or not it’s actually gotten harder to do that year by month by week, or if she’s just in a bad place right now — the funny thing about being in a bad place is, if it’s bad enough, you can’t see how bad it is, can’t remember that things used to be better except through the lens of how badly you’ve fucked things up, how much better you used to be at dealing with life. Grantaire was _never_ good at dealing with work, but she thinks she used to be better than she is now. She feels like her mind’s grown more sluggish, can feel her body struggling more and more to keep up under the weight of the abuse she heaps on it. She can blame the substance abuse for how much harder it is to concentrate on a book or a movie or a painting — the parts of her brain that enable her to be a proper person are dying off cell by cell, and she has no one to blame but herself — and she can blame the weight of years for the raw, sick feeling in her throat when she wakes up, for the heartburn that comes and goes every time she has a drink, her body shoving acid up her gullet in protest of the booze she swallows down. She once had a professor who came across her furtively smoking on a bench outside Craigie Hall on campus — she’d liked him, thought he looked like a cross between Alan Tudyk and Jon Stewart and talked a snarkier game than either man; he’d liked her cutting comments and her unwillingness to go along with the assumptions the other students swallowed, had believed in her where he shouldn’t have — and she’d expected censure upon his exclamation of “You’re a smoker!” But he’d just sat down beside her and said, “I used to smoke, too. Everything’s easier when you’re in your twenties. It’s when you turn thirty you have to cut that shit out. Your body stops cooperating.”

Grantaire’s only 25 and she thinks her body’s about had it with her, but she can’t really blame the professor for his overestimation of her fortitude; she put her aging cells under far more stress than any sane person would do.

She thinks about quitting sometimes, at night when she’s alone, or when she’s huddled around a cigarette in the rapidly cooling night, outside of work. Not drinking — every time that thought flits by she squashes it in a fit of terror — but smoking, she should be able to do. Smoking has no point. Smoking just makes her jittery the more she does it, leaves her with shaking hands and a frightened heart that she needs to drown with an emptied glass. Joly was horrified when, upon giving her a tentative lecture on the detriments of smoking, she’d been able to outrecite him by far. She knows the carcinogens, how quickly the body starts to repair as soon as you stop. She can recite all the ways smoking can kill her by heart, and while when she looks at the grim health ads on the packages — the man with the hole in his throat and the Soccer Dad Mustache with the caption, solemn, “I wish / I had never / started / smoking” — she isn’t _thrilled_ at the prospect of ending up with her body officially rotting from the inside out, but all the knowledge in the world can’t quite kill the compulsion to keep going. Grantaire doesn’t mind the idea of not smoking for, say, the next month. She could do it. But never smoking again, _ever_?

The idea of stopping something that wastes her money, that’s killing her, sends her into a frenzy of panicked rebellion, and she hates herself all the more for it.

She isn’t _surprised_ when Bahorel and Feuilly buzz her, demanding entry — she knows she’s not good at hiding her emotions, even if she tries, and her friends, stupid fucks that they are, have always done their best to lift her back up again — though she has to scrabble around for a shirt after buzzing them in, hadn’t quite gotten around to putting on anything more than a pair of pajama pants, even though it’s past 6 o’clock. By the time they let themselves in, Grantaire’s emerging from her room with a smirk and a bottle of beer, enough of a gameface to face her friends with.

“We’re making trouble tonight,” Bahorel announces, arms crossed, in her usual armour of leather jacket, white tank top, worn jeans and boots, hair pulled back in a ponytail, devoid of makeup, smirking. “You’re coming with.” Feuilly, behind her, gives a little wave, no more dressed up than Bahorel is. There’s something comforting about the fact that, even in a group with Courfeyrac and Jehan’s distinct but equally eclectic and dramatic fashion senses, with Maria’s girly, pretty dresses, Combeferre’s flawlessly put-together academic wear, and Enjolras’s ability to look like she fell out of a fashion spread in any button-up and pair of trousers, Grantaire can always count on Bahorel and Feuilly to put equally minimal effort into their appearances as she does. Mind, Feuilly mostly does because she’s always busy, while Grantaire mostly does because she’s always drunk and depressed, and Bahorel occupies some space in between, but she appreciates it, nonetheless.

“What kind of trouble?” Grantaire asks, stepping out towards the deck, reaching for a pack of cigarettes — it’s one of her talents, remembering more or less where her current pack is, given how the empties are scattered around the apartment between her and Emile — even as she takes another drink. “Should I bring body armour?”

“Motherfucker, if you had body armour, you’d have shown us by now,” Bahorel scoffs, heading for the fridge to get herself and Feuilly beers to match. (This is the least Grantaire can do; share what she can with her friends. It’s the least she can offer for how much needless bullshit she puts them all through.) “There’s a show at the Palomino tonight. Feuilly’s ex is in the band. You’re going to come with us to show support and dance with us and remind him how fucking useless he is. We’re going to fucking _decimate_ every man in that shithole, and we’re going to get free fucking drinks in the process.”

Grantaire snorts, opening the patio door, not bothering to slide on a jacket or sweater, even though her shoulders tense automatically at the chilly air outside, the concrete cold through her sock feet, the metal almost cold enough to be painful as she leans on it, lighting up and exhaling a cloud of smoke over the houses that bracket her apartment building. Bahorel comes out with her while Feuilly lingers in the livingroom, looking over the art and magazines Grantaire’s left scattered around, sipping her beer. 

“I’ve got your cover,” Bahorel says, and Grantaire tenses automatically, shooting her a look as she exhales the smoke in her mouth and draws it in again through the nose, grip on her bottle tightening. “Shut up,” Bahorel adds. “You’re doing us a favour. We need a posse. You can buy me a fucking drink for it.”

“I think I already did,” Grantaire points out, relaxing slightly as she smirks at Bahorel’s beer, which she takes a defiant pull from.

“Fuck that. Cover’s going to be ten and this put you out, what, 2 bucks? You can buy me another fucking drink.” Grantaire is fairly sure Bahorel is already a couple of drinks in, and the knowledge relaxes her somewhat as she laughs around the lips of her bottle.

“You’re tipping the tender,” she says, letting her eyes slide back out over the rooftops of Kensington, unconsciously searching out the building that houses the Roasterie, even though Enjolras won’t be there tonight, will probably be at the library studying with Combeferre and Courfeyrac, back on campus.

From the worn wooden decor and the upper floor, it’d be easy to mistake The Palomino for a tribute to the faux-Western bullshit that Calgary’s mythos is twined around, and to a certain extent, it is. The menu’s all modern would-be cowboy food, meat and potatoes and barbecue, apples baked in Jack Daniels sauce. The main tender up top is a big bearded dude who wouldn’t look out of place as an extra on _Sons of Anarchy_. Downstairs, though, local bands play, mostly a bunch of semi-toneless garage rock groups, taking hints of pop punk and folk and art rock as each group sees fit. Grantaire’s been there countless times, as have Feuilly and Bahorel as musicians, and they have all mourned the repainting of the graffiti that used to cover the women’s washroom (much of it about the coveted bubble butt of the Palomino’s booking agent), had bartenders pour them flaming shots that set half the bar counter on fire, danced until they could barely stand. The Pal is a solid place, a nice halfway mark between somewhere like Broken City, where all the hipsters who want to be seen and scene come in their best deliberately worn clothes, and somewhere like Vern’s, which is basically a hole, if a nice hole, as holes go.

Feuilly’s ex’s band is not very good, but they’re loud, and Bahorel keeps buying them all drinks, so Grantaire is more or less okay with life. While Bahorel continues her efforts to start up a moshpit despite the lack of participation — and looks of vague disdain, discomfort, and fear from those she tries to get involved — Grantaire makes for the bar for another drink, already feeling like her face is slightly detached from the nerves that connect them to her skull. The world is a little wobbly, but thankfully she was under no pressure to wear heels (something that Montparnasse tends to encourage), so gravity should stay manageable for another three drinks at least. The sound guys at local shows never seem to get the levels right — the vocals always blur into the general atmosphere of grating, bass-heavy noise — and Grantaire ponders how much of that is the sound guy, and how much of it is shitty vocalists not knowing how to project. She sets her elbows up on the bar, standing on her toes to lean forward, relishing in the stickiness beneath her arms. There are two tenders — one male and one female — and Grantaire sets her eyes on the girl, tall and Asian and willowy, willing her to be the one to notice Grantaire first.

Miraculously, she does, nodding and smiling at Grantaire as she approaches. “What can I get you?”

Grantaire leans forward further on the bar, what little cleavage she has squished out against the bar as she raises her voice to say, “Three shots of tequila, one Steamwhistle.” The girl smiles again, starting to ready the drinks. Grantaire considers flirting with her, and doesn’t — between her continued state of hopelessness regarding Enjolras and her strange, not-quite relationship with Parnasse, she’s in enough trouble these days, she thinks. The thought gives her a wave of not-quite-nausea, the anxiety bubbling up in her chest again, and she pushes it away with a smile at the girl, holding out some money and shaking her head when the tender offers her the change, offering up a wink as she picks up the bottle with her mouth and balances the shots, making for Feuilly and Bahorel.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that those in love with bad ideas and group activities will always want to make their friends take shots of tequila. Nearly everyone seems to have A Tequila Story; personally, Grantaire has no more tequila stories than she does stories of any other sort of alcoohl, which means she has quite a lot. A crippling hangover, terrible one night stand, charge of public nudity or dawning in a new city she has no memory of traveling to, however, have never served as adequate deterrent from trying something again, for Grantaire. She smirks around the bottle as Feuilly’s eyebrows raise, then eyes roll, at the sight of the shots, Bahorel temporarily pulling herself away from the Very Important Matter of Pissing Everyone Off to take the shots with them. The taste is bitter and good, and neither Bahorel nor Grantaire are quick enough of their feet anymore to stop Feuilly when she moves to collect their glasses and take them back to the bar. As Grantaire wipes her mouth and takes another pull of beer, Bahorel’s eyes follow Feuilly’s tall red head through the crowd, pupils dark, licking her lips. “Fuckin’ ever the worker bee,” Bahorel remarks, sounding rueful, and Grantaire smiles, knocking their hips together.

“Ever planning on telling her you want to fuck her up against a wall?” she prods, and Bahorel shoves her, snorting.

“You’re one to talk.”

By the time the headliner finishes, it’s well past 1, transit nearly shut down for the night, and last call looming far too close. Fortunately, the liquor stores are open til 2 and Grantaire’s place is only a 20-minute walk away — maybe 35, given their respective states of coordination — so they head up the stairs and into the night, Bahorel pulling her jacket closed and Grantaire throwing her arms open to the deep chill of late summer, embracing the cold. Feuilly, the most sober of the three despite the other two’s best efforts, just gives them a look.

They stop at the liquor store on 8th and 6th, pooling what change they have left together for a mickey of whiskey, and head for the river, walking thin dirt paths through brush to reach the edge, avoiding the sound of other voices and the spots where Calgary’s regrettably northern homeless population have deposited their belongings, jackets and food wrappers left beneath bushes. By the time they reemerge and make for the bridge into Kensington, the bottle is empty and 3 AM is in sight. There is a brief struggle with Grantaire’s keys — Feuilly, finally, is about as drunk as the other two, thanks to a conspiracy between Bahorel and Grantaire to only pass the whiskey to one another through her, and is not much help in the minor crisis — before she fits her housekey properly into the lock and leads the charge up to the apartment. They are probably stomping and giggling too loudly for her neighbour’s tastes. Grantaire probably doesn’t care.

The next morning, Feuilly and Bahorel will not remember how they ended up in Grantaire’s bed, though Feuilly’s arm will be slung over Bahorel’s waist, and Bahorel will still be wearing her leather jacket. Grantaire sleeps on the couch after one last cigarette on the deck, leaning heavily against the railing and relishing the night air, and before she falls asleep, she’s smiling.

* * *

Weeks pass, the city rebuilds from the floods, and Enjolras and Grantaire settle back into their tentative, mutually abrasive peace, the rest of the Amies relaxing with them — although Emile keeps shooting Enjolras looks that say he’d like nothing so much as to stuff her into one of the Roasterie’s mugs and hold it under the steaming wand for a while. 

By the time September’s in full swing, things are just about the way they were before, save a few fading scars.

Both Enjolras and Courfeyrac were already exhausted by the time classes resumed, worn down by a city too caught up in flood relief to consider the plight of the oppressed outside the province’s borders. Feuilly is even busier than usual, still trying to sort out the financial and emotional devastation of her home’s uprooting, and her strain is evident in Bahorel’s unusually high predilection for fights — unusually high, for Bahorel, is a terrifying sight to behold. Courfeyrac has been cagey lately, despite her insistence on smiling and remaining a bastion of optimism and emotional support for the group, and both Enjolras and Grantaire have shorter fuses than usual, Enjolras’s leading to anger, and Grantaire’s to a spiral of self-pity and self-loathing that even her best friends struggle to lift her out of. 

Combeferre takes it all, as she usually does, with quiet grace. It is her job to sort through the chaff and keep her friends going, calmly steering them towards the end goal. Enjolras inspires, Courfeyrac comforts, and Combeferre directs and delegates, never breaking a sweat.

Still, it’s been a difficult year, and Combeferre is human; she has headaches more often, and even the methodical task of colour-coding her lecture notes fails to soothe her these days. There’s been a discord among Les Amies since the floods — maybe even before — and it makes everything that much more difficult to navigate. When even _Courf_ seems unsettled, something is wrong.

It isn’t as if Combeferre is blind to the lingering glances Courfeyrac has given her, or the uncharacteristic shyness that has sometimes ruled her friend’s speech and touch in the last several weeks. Combeferre, though just as driven as Enjolras, is not as emotionally stupefied as her friend. She is far too observant for her own good. She’s used to noticing things about her friends they’ve barely processed themselves; what she’s unused to is these observations concerning _Courf_ , who’s usually in touch with her emotions to the point of Shakespearean melodrama. Really, Courfeyrac has a tendency to make Shakespeare look like Munro. Combeferre can handle Enjolras being driven to the point of self-abuse; that’s normal enough. Having Courfeyrac tiptoe around her is entirely another matter.

Combeferre can guess the cause well enough; it’s the solution that’s tripping her up.

For the most part, Combeferre’s (lack of) sexuality has been a moot point for Les Amies. As a group that is in theory dedicated to the eradication of oppression for all marginalized groups (if, in practice, one that sometimes missteps, as all are bound to), her friends are wholehearted advocates of as-much-or-as-little-sex-as-you-want-to-have, with who you’d like to have it (or not), provided all parties are enthusiastically consenting. The Amies themselves run the spectrum, with some of them giving names to how they feel, and others declining to. That Combeferre has never shown any particular interest in dating before has never worried Les Amise; many of them assume she is too busy, or simply too _together_ , for anyone to really appeal. Once, memorably, Combeferre walked in on the middle of Bahorel and Courfeyrac having an animated discussion about the Secret Life of Combeferre, which seemed to involve a lot of whips and edible body paint.

The truth is less titillating. The truth is, for better or worse, Combeferre has never been that interested in sex, romance, or any of it. Growing up with Enjolras meant Combeferre was somewhat insulated from the usual concerns ace and aro people seem to have — it never occurred to her that she was broken, because if she was, by all appearances, her best friend was, too. It wasn’t until her late teens that she found any label for herself, and when she did, she was on the whole unconcerned with the thing. She’s gone on dates, though she’s never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or any other sort of partner. She’s even kissed people and partaken in what Courfeyrac gleefully calls ‘handsy landsy stuff,’ but it was never interesting enough to actively pursue. Combeferre has accepted that her dysfunctional group of friends are effectively her collective life partner, and gotten on with life.

It never really occurred to one of them might start carrying a torch for her. If it had, she wouldn’t have suspected _Courf_ to fall victim, Courf, possibly the most well-versed of all of them in the art of casual sex and serial dating. There is something about Courfeyrac that smacks of invincibility, even if Combeferre knows it isn’t quite true; her ability to befriend anyone, to be at once endlessly friendly and utterly fearsome, an extrovert to the core, leaves quite a lot of people convinced that no one has the power to hurt Courfeyrac. But Combeferre has seen her at her worst enough times — lamenting a law, curling up around a friend’s pain — to know that isn’t the case.

If Combeferre were going to date, she would happily date someone like Courfeyrac. She’s smart, and vital, and endlessly caring, and Combeferre can objectively appreciate that she’s very attractive. Objectively, she would be considered more attractive than Combeferre by most, for matters of weight and race both. But the fact of the matter remains: Combeferre isn’t all that interested in the sort of love that comes with possessiveness and flowers and fingering, and that leaves her in an unusual fix.

The picnic is innocuous enough. While most of the parks remain in a state of disarray from the floods, Nose Hill, certainly, is untouched, far too high and too far from the river to have taken any damage, and they set up on a rise still green with summer, with fruit, bread, and cheese spread out on the blanket they sit on, notebooks at their sides and pens at the ready. (There is a package of cupcakes, too; as Courfeyrac had said, “A picnic without a dessert is a _dirty lie_ , Combeferre.”)

Ostensibly, the idea is to work on some goals for Les Amis without Enjolras’s harried presence nearby; she’s been worn thin all summer and worse since classes started up again, and sometimes, much as they all love their leader, they need a break from her. “Besides,” Courfeyrac had said, “we need _quality friend bonding time_ , Combie. If we’re always with a third blonde wheel we’ll _lose that special something_.”

So here they are, on a grassy hill on a sunny September day that really isn’t warm enough for the sundress Courfeyrac wore, splitting a loaf of foccacia between them, pressing brie down into the bread with a flimsy plastic knife from the grocery store.

“Maria is in love,” Courfeyrac informs her, smearing the chunk of bread in her hand with brie. Combeferre shoots her a glance, eyebrows rising above the frame of her glasses.

“Oh?”

Courf nods, repressing a smile. “Some friend of Paul’s — the DJ, Polyester? They _shared a magical glance_ across Commonwealth and now Maria is in love. She’s been pining after his Facebook profile for weeks.”

Combeferre exhales, not quite a laugh, selecting a grape. “And you haven’t interfered?”

“I sent him a friend request and he accepted,” Courf says solemnly around her mouthful of bread and brie. “Sometimes she takes my phone when she thinks I’m not paying attention and makes sad eyes at his status updates. I tried sending him a message saying my friend wanted him to make sweet, gentle love to her, but Maria wouldn’t let me.”

This time, the glance Combeferre shoots her is more chastising, though still tempered by amusement. “It might be better to arrange something they’ll both be at. Much as everyone loves unasked-for internet propositions.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” Courfeyrac exclaims, leaning forward with her excitement, eyes bright, bread half-forgotten in her hands. “So, about your birthday…”

Combeferre sighs and resigns herself to an afternoon of planning of a significantly less productive than planned for nature. If nothing else, at least there are cupcakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter underwhelms me, but if I want to add to it I have to write a lengthy scene that I don't have the energy for right now, so I'm afraid you'll have to take it for what it is. Kudos and comments are my lifeblood, and concrit is always welcome. If I fuck up, tell me. I will try to give another update soon, as my life is regaining some semblance of routine, which means I can actually try _scheduling writing time_ again, wow! Come find me on [tumblr](http://drunkjolras.tumblr.com), where there is a [tag](http://drunkjolras.tumblr.com/tagged/chinook+arch) for this fic that might see a fanmix or two soon. 
> 
> If you have any characters that you want to see more of, let me know, because we're now at the part of the fic where I only have the bare bones (ie. E/R scenes) written, and the subplots need fleshing out anyway. I do take requests! Please note that this verse's Combeferre is both ace and aro, and Courfeyrac is aro and pansexual, and none of that will be changing in this fic.
> 
> Next time on Chinook Arch: birthday parties! Not-quite-long-lost loves reunited! Significant others at meetings! And _even more_ miscommunication and poorly handled social situations! Wow, exciting.

**Author's Note:**

> For reference's sake: Enjolras, Grantaire, Jehan, Feuilly, Bahorel, Bossuet, Joly, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre all have the same names as usual. I was flipping a coin to see who ended up male or female past e/R and Joly was the only one to stay in his original gender. Sorry, Joly. No multiple orgasms for you. Éponine is now Émile. Cosette is now Cyril. Marius is now Maria. Musichetta is now Coda. Montparnasse and Gavroche will probably turn up at some point, too.
> 
> If you want to talk to me find me on [tumblr](http://igpykin.tumblr.com). Also, if you don't know why the rise to power of Canadian PM (and native Calgarian) Stephen Harper is something that would probably piss Enjolras off, please refer to these links: [Shit Harper Did](http://www.shd.ca/), [Why Not Harper?](http://www.whynotharper.ca/), [Stephen Harper's War on the Environment](http://quietmike.org/2013/04/01/stephen-harpers-war-on-the-environment/). There is a wealth of information on why he's a terrible PM. Google. Arm yourselves with knowledge. Hate away.


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